2018/04/13 by Francesco Capozzi, Ian M. Shoemaker, Luca Vecchi · 59 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Dark radiation #Measurements of neutrino speed #Neutrino #Neutrino detector #Neutrino oscillation #Physics beyond the Standard Model #Standard Model (mathematical formulation) #hep-ex #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2018/07/004
published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2018(07), 004 (Institute of Physics) · 28 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2018/04/13 · openalex created_date 2018/04/24 · openalex publication_date 2018/07/02 · arxiv updated 2018/07/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We examine scenarios in which a dark sector (dark matter, dark radiation, or dark energy) couples to the active neutrinos. For light and weakly-coupled exotic sectors we find that scalar, vector, or tensor dark backgrounds may appreciably impact neutrino propagation while remaining practically invisible to all other phenomenological probes. The dark medium may induce small departures from the Standard Model predictions or even offer an alternative explanation of neutrino oscillations. While the propagation of neutrinos is affected in all experiments, atmospheric data currently represent the most promising probe of the new physics scale. We quantify the future sensitivity of the ORCA detector of KM3NeT and the IceCube experiment and find that all exotic effects can be constrained at the level of a few percent of the Earth matter potential, with couplings mediating μ-neutrino transitions being most constrained. Long baseline experiments like DUNE may provide additional complementary information on the scale of the dark sector.