2016/04/30 by Jue Zhang, Shun Zhou
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic physics #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Excited state #Ground state #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Radiative transfer #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.93.113020
published as Phys. Rev. D 93, 113020 (2016) · 11 pages, 6 figures, minor changes, matches the published version
openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex publication_date 2016/06/29 · arxiv created 2016/06/30 · arxiv updated 2016/07/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The atomic transition from an excited state |e⟩ to the ground state |g⟩ by emitting a neutrino pair and a photon, i.e., |e⟩\ensuremath→|g⟩+|\ensuremathγ⟩+|\ensuremathνi⟩+|\ensuremathνj⟩ with i, j=1, 2, 3, has been proposed by Yoshimura and his collaborators as an alternative way to determine the absolute scale m0 of neutrino masses. More recently, a statistical analysis of the fine structure of the photon spectrum from this atomic process has been performed [N. Song et al. Phys. Rev. D 93, 013020 (2016)] to quantitatively examine the experimental requirements for a realistic determination of absolute neutrino masses. In this paper, we show how to improve the statistical analysis and demonstrate that the previously required detection time can be reduced by one order of magnitude for the case of a 3\ensuremathσ determination of m0\ensuremath∼0.01 eV with an accuracy better than 10%. Such an improvement is very encouraging for further investigations on measuring absolute neutrino masses through atomic processes.