Effects of Dark Photons on Pulsar Kicks

Abstract

Several studies that have been carried out on supernova explosions and their remnants (pulsars) so far ended up with two fundamental problems: How are the left-handed neutrinos released out of the star and how do the supernova explosions happen even the inner core region of the star is extremely dense for propagation of the left-handed neutrinos? How can the pulsars attain very high kick velocities after the burst? The main goal of this thesis is to contribute to resolutions of the aforementioned problems by using new particles. The particles under concern are dark-photon which is immune to all the forces in the SM but gravity and interacts with the SM spectrum through only its kinetic mixing with the photon (actually the hypercharge gauge boson) and the right-handed neutrino which posseses dark electric charge (couples to dark photon). By proposing new particles, we find an interval for the photon-dark photon mixing parameter consistent with the values proposed by the string theory and the experiments. We calculate some pulsar kick velocities consistent with the observations for some magnetic field values and mixing parameter values. We show that the right-handed neutrinos may have electric charges which are not quantized and on the order of 10−6e.