New Axion Bounds from the White Dwarf Luminosity Function

BRENDA MELENDEZ; MARCELO MILLER BERTOLAMI; LEANDRO ALTHAUS

Florianópolis

Conferencia; Latin American Regional IAU Meeting; 2013

It has been shown that the shape of the lumi-nosity function of white dwarfs (WDLF) is a power-ful tool to check for the possible existence of DFSZ-axions. We show that the impact of the axion emis-sion into the neutrino emission cannot be neglectedat high luminosities and that the axionemission needs to be incorporated self-consistenlyinto the evolution of the white dwarfs when dealingwith axion masses larger than ma>5 meV.. Also, we have performed \chi^2-tests to have a quantita-tive measure of the agreement between the theoreti-cal WDLFs- computed under the assumptions of dif-ferent axion masses- and the observed WDLFs of theGalactic disk.