Meaningful Details: the Value of Adding Baseline Dependence to the Neutrino-Dark Matter Effect
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Meaningful Details: the Value of Adding Baseline Dependence to the Neutrino-Dark Matter Effect William S. Marks1
· Fu-Guang Cao1
Received: 4 August 2020 / Accepted: 23 October 2020 / Published online: 18 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The possible effect on the flavour spectra of astronomical neutrinos from a neutrino-dark matter interaction has been investigated for decoherent neutrinos de Salas et al., (Phys. Rev. D 94(12), 123001 2016). In this work, we report results calculated for coherent neutrinos. This was done with two different models for the neutrino dark-matter interactions: a flavor eigenstate coupling, as for the weak interaction in the Standard Model, and a mass eigenstate coupling, which is predicted by certain non-Standard Models (specifically Scotogenic models). It was found that using a coherent analysis dramatically increased the explorable parameter space for the neutrino-dark matter interaction. However, the detection of coherent astronomical neutrinos presents a significant challenge to experimentalists, because such a detection would require an improvement in energy resolution by at least six orders of magnitude, with similar improvements in astronomical distance determinations. Keywords Neutrinos · Neutrino oscillations · MSW effect · Dark matter
1 Introduction Astronomical observations over the last several decades have consistently shown that, in simple terms, galaxies spin too fast for the visible matter they contain to hold them together gravitationally. This means that either the standard theory of gravity needs to be modified or that there are other forms of matter present which do not participate in the other Standard Model interactions (the electroweak and strong interactions) or only do so extremely weakly. Given that no satisfactory alternative theory of gravity has been developed, it is generally presumed that there is a type of matter that is quite common but is currently undetectable. This matter is called “Dark Matter” (DM) [2, 3].
William S. Marks
[email protected] 1
Institute of Fundamental Sciences, Massey University, Private Bag 11 222, Palmerston North, New Zealand
3952
International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2020) 59:3951–3966
Neutrinos are electro-magnetically neutral leptons with a very small mass (the heaviest neutrino is at least six orders of magnitude lighter than the electron) [4]. Intrinsically connected to the massive nature of neutrinos is neutrino oscillations, also known as flavour mixing [5]. (Indeed, the massive nature of neutrinos was proven by the discovery of neutrino oscillations [6, 7].) The currently favoured model for neutrino oscillations is three-neutrino mixing whereby a neutrino produced in one of the three flavour states enters into a quantum superposition of the three mass states which then propogate at different velocities due to having different masses. These velocity differences produce interference effects which cause the flavour content of the wavepacket to c
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