Tip of the Red Giant Branch Bounds on the Neutrino Magnetic Dipole Moment Revisited

2023/07/24 by Noah Franz, Franz, Noah, Mitchell T Dennis +3 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle accelerators and beam dynamics #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.13050

openalex publication_date 2023/07/24 · openalex created_date 2023/07/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We use a novel method to constrain the neutrino magnetic dipole moment (μ_ν) using the empirically-calibrated tip of the red giant branch I-band magnitude that fully accounts for uncertainties in stellar physics. Our method uses machine learning to emulate the results of stellar evolution codes. This reduces the I-Band magnitude computation time to milliseconds, which enables a Bayesian statistical analysis where μ_ν is varied simultaneously with the stellar physics, allowing for a complete exploration of parameter space. We find the region μ_ν ≤ 6×10^-12μ_\textrmB (with μ_\textrmB the Bohr magneton), previously believed to be excluded, is unconstrained after accounting for degeneracies with stellar physics. It is likely that larger values are similarly unconstrained. We discuss the implications of our results for future neutrino magnetic dipole moment searches and for other astrophysical probes.

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• Isochrone fitting of Galactic globular clusters - IX. Tip of the red-giant branch for 27 clusters and constraints on new particle physics

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