COHERENT enlightenment of the neutrino dark side

2017/08/09 by Pilar Coloma, M. C. González-García, M. C. Gonzalez-Garcia +2 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #CP violation #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Degeneracy (biology) #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino oscillation #Nuclear physics #Octant (instrument) #Oscillation (cell signaling) #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quark #Solar neutrino #hep-ex #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.96.115007

published as Phys. Rev. D 96, 115007 (2017) · 5 pages, 3 figures

arxiv created 2017/08/09 · openalex publication_date 2017/12/11 · arxiv updated 2017/12/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

In the presence of nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI), oscillation data are affected by a degeneracy which allows the solar mixing angle to be in the second octant (also known as the dark side) and implies a sign flip of the atmospheric mass-squared difference. This leads to an ambiguity in the determination of the ordering of neutrino masses, one of the main goals of the current and future experimental neutrino program. We show that the recent observation of coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering by the COHERENT experiment, in combination with global oscillation data, excludes the NSI degeneracy at the 3.1\ensuremathσ (3.6\ensuremathσ) C.L. for NSI with up (down) quarks.

Citations

• A model for large non-standard interactions of neutrinos leading to the LMA-Dark solution
• Non-standard neutrino interactions with matter from physics beyond the Standard Model
• Present and future bounds on non-standard neutrino interactions
• Curtailing the dark side in non-standard neutrino interactions

Cited by

• Determining the nuclear neutron distribution from Coherent Elastic neutrino-Nucleus Scattering: current results and future prospects
• Astrophysical constraints on nonstandard coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering