Neutrino damping in a fermion and scalar background

2018/12/31 by José F. Nieves, Sarira Sahu
Physics and Astronomy · #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Fermion #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino oscillation #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #astro-ph.HE #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.99.095013

published as Phys. Rev. D 99, 095013 (2019) · 19 pages, 2 figures

openalex publication_date 2019/05/16 · arxiv created 2019/05/17 · arxiv updated 2019/05/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We consider the propagation of a neutrino in a background composed of a scalar particle and a fermion using a simple model for the coupling of the form \ensuremathλf_R\ensuremathν_L\ensuremathφ. In the presence of these interactions there can be damping terms in the neutrino effective potential and index of refraction. We calculate the imaginary part of the neutrino self-energy in this case, from which the damping terms are determined. The results are useful in the context of dark matter-neutrino interaction models in which the scalar and/or fermion constitute the dark matter. The corresponding formulas for models in which the scalar particle couples to two neutrinos via a coupling of the form \ensuremathλ^(\ensuremathν\ensuremathν\ensuremathφ)\ensuremathν_R^c\ensuremathν_L\ensuremathφ are then obtained as a special case, which can be important also in the context of neutrino collective oscillations in a supernova and in the early Universe hot plasma before neutrino decoupling. A particular feature of our results is that the damping term in a \ensuremathν\ensuremathφ background is independent of the antineutrino-neutrino asymmetry in the background. Therefore, the relative importance of the damping term may be more significant if the neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry in the background is small, because the leading Z-exchange and \ensuremathφ-exchange contributions to the effective potential, which are proportional to the neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry, are suppressed in that case, while the damping term is not.

Citations

• Observable Consequences of a Scalar Boson Coupled only to Neutrinos
• Non-standard neutrino interactions with matter from physics beyond the Standard Model
• Effects of non-standard neutrino–electron interactions on relic neutrino decoupling
• Collective Neutrino Oscillations
• Dark matter-neutrino interactions through the lens of their cosmological implications
• JUNO Sensitivity to Resonant Absorption of Galactic Supernova Neutrinos by Dark Matter