Tip of the Red Giant Branch Bounds on the Axion-Electron Coupling Revisited (2305.03113v1)

Abstract: We present a novel method to constrain the axion-electron coupling constant using the observed calibration of the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) I band magnitude $M_I$ that fully accounts for uncertainties and degeneracies with stellar input physics.~We simulate a grid of 116,250 models varying initial mass, helium abundance, and metallicity and train a machine learning emulator to predict $M_I$ as a function of these parameters.~Our emulator enables the use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations where the axion-electron coupling $\alpha_{26}$ is varied simultaneously with the stellar parameters. We find that, once stellar uncertainties and degeneracies are accounted for, the region $\alpha_{26} < 2$ is not excluded by empirical TRGB calibrations.~Our work opens up a large region of parameter space currently believed to be excluded.~$\alpha_{26} = 2$ is the upper limit of the parameter space considered by this study, and it is likely that larger values of $\alpha_{26}$ are also unconstrained.~We discuss potential applications of our work to reevaluate other astrophysical probes of new physics.