Light Curves and Event Rates of Axion Instability Supernovae

It was recently proposed that exotic particles can trigger a new stellar instability which is analogous to the e-e+ pair instability if they are produced and reach equilibrium in the stellar plasma. In this study, we construct axion instability supernova (AISN) models caused by the new instability to predict their observational signatures. We focus on heavy axion-like particles (ALPs) with masses of ~400 keV--2 MeV and coupling with photons of g_{ag}~10^{-5} GeV^{-1}. It is found that the 56Ni mass and the explosion energy are significantly increased by ALPs for a fixed stellar mass. As a result, the peak times of the light curves of AISNe occur earlier than those of standard pair-instability supernovae by 10--20 days when the ALP mass is equal to the electron mass. Also, the event rate of AISNe is 1.7--2.6 times higher than that of pair-instability supernovae, depending on the high mass cutoff of the initial mass function.
10 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in ApJ