Improved supernova bounds on CP-even scalars: cooling and decay constraints

Abstract

Supernovae provide among the most powerful probes of weakly-coupled new particles in the MeV mass range, where laboratory experiments lose sensitivity. In this work, we derive improved supernova constraints on CP-even scalars mixing with the Higgs boson, combining an updated production rate calculation, which improves the cooling bound by more than an order of magnitude, with new decay-based constraints from the galactic 511~keV positron flux and energy deposition in low-energy Type~II-P supernovae. Together, these constraints probe mixing angles as small as $\sin\theta \sim 10^{-9}$, more than five orders of magnitude below existing collider bounds. We also extend our analysis to a hadrophilic scalar model, constraining Yukawa couplings down to $y_N \sim 10^{-10}$. Our results demonstrate that the combination of astrophysical and collider probes covers over nine orders of magnitude in coupling for these classes of models, probing a large region of parameter space motivated by dark matter considerations.