Abstract
We discuss novel ways in which neutrino oscillation experiments can probe dark matter. In particular, we focus on interactions between neutrinos and ultra-light ("fuzzy") dark matter particles with masses of order $10^{-22}$ eV. It has been shown previously that such dark matter candidates are phenomenologically successful and might help ameliorate the tension between predicted and observed small scale structures in the Universe. We argue that coherent forward scattering of neutrinos on fuzzy dark matter particles can significantly alter neutrino oscillation probabilities. These effects could be observable in current and future experiments. We set new limits on fuzzy dark matter interacting with neutrinos using T2K and solar neutrino data, and we estimate the sensitivity of reactor neutrino experiments and of future long-baseline accelerator experiments. These results are based on detailed simulations in GLoBES. We allow the dark matter particle to be either a scalar or a vector boson. In the latter case, we find potentially interesting connections to models addressing various $B$ physics anomalies.
Highlights
Our ignorance about the particle physics nature of dark matter (DM) is so vast that viable candidate particles span more than 90 orders of magnitude in mass
Even though we find in both cases an acceptable goodness of fit, standard oscillations are disfavored compared to the new physics hypothesis
As the preference for new physics in our fit is somewhat stronger than in a fit including full spectral data [94], we show in Fig. 2 conservative constraints obtained by artificially inflating the error bars of all solar data points by a factor of 2
Summary
Our ignorance about the particle physics nature of dark matter (DM) is so vast that viable candidate particles span more than 90 orders of magnitude in mass. Fuzzy DM has been studied mostly in the context of axions or other extremely light scalar fields [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13] Such DM candidates can be searched for in laboratory experiments using cavity-based haloscopes [14,15,16], helioscopes [17,18,19,20], LC circuits [21], atomic clocks [22,23], atomic spectroscopy [24] and interferometry [25], as well as accelerometers [26] and magnetometry [27,28,29]. Similar effects have been considered previously in Ref. [56], where the focus has been on anomalous temporal modulation of neutrino oscillation probabilities
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