Detecting non-relativistic cosmic neutrinos by capture on tritium: phenomenology and physics potential
By A. J. Long, C. Lunardini, Eray Sabancilar. 2014
142 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the physics potential of the detection of the Cosmic Neutrino Background via neutrino capture on tritium, taking the proposed PTOLEMY experiment as a case study. With the projected energy resolution of Δ ∼ 0.15 eV, the experiment will be sensitive to neutrino masses with degenerate spectrum, m1 ≃ m2 ≃ m3 = mν ≳ 0.1 eV. These neutrinos are non-relativistic today; detecting them would be a unique opportunity to probe this unexplored kinematical regime. The signature of neutrino capture is a peak in the electron spectrum that is displaced by 2 mν above the beta decay endpoint. The signal would exceed the background from beta decay if the energy resolution is Δ ≲ 0.7 mν . Interestingly, the total capture rate depends on the origin of the neutrino mass, being ΓD ≃ 4 and ΓM ≃ 8 events per year (for a 100 g tritium target) for unclustered Dirac and Majorana neutrinos, respectively. An enhancement of the rate of up to 𝒪(1) is expected due to gravitational clustering, with the unique potential to probe the local overdensity of neutrinos. Turning to more exotic neutrino physics, PTOLEMY could be sensitive to a lepton asymmetry, and reveal the eV-scale sterile neutrino that is favored by short baseline oscillation searches. The experiment would also be sensitive to a neutrino lifetime on the order of the age of the universe and break the degeneracy between neutrino mass and lifetime which affects existing bounds.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bddc5cb2c25347b84aeea88c89505e34c0afa4e5
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2018, background): “ution is required to distinguish this signal from the tail distribution of the -decay spectrum. Likewise the detection of the keV neutrino DM through -capture on -decaying nuclei was also considered [526,533,535]. keV neutrinos induced mono-energetic electron signal would appear at T e = E 0+M, thus”
- Neutrino physics with the PTOLEMY project: active neutrino properties and the light sterile case (2019, background): “Depending on the lightest neutrino mass, therefore, the event rate may change by a factor in the range 1-2, thus between the Dirac and Majorana cases, again considering only standard interactions [40, 42].”
- A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, methodology): “In the laboratory frame, the spin-averaged cross section for neutrino capture is given by [979]”
- Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay: 2015 Review (2016, background): “We will not discuss further the feasibility of such an experiment, and refer to [70, 71] formore details.”