Abstract
We present a new technique for observing low energy neutrinos with the aim of detecting the cosmic neutrino background using ion storage rings. Utilising high energy targets exploits the quadratic increase in the neutrino capture cross section with beam energy, and with sufficient beam energy, enables neutrino capture through inverse-beta decay processes from a stable initial state. We also show that there exist ion systems admitting resonant neutrino capture, capable of achieving larger capture cross sections at lower beam energies than their non-resonant counterparts. We calculate the neutrino capture rate and the optimal experimental runtime for a range of different resonant processes and target ions and we demonstrate that the resonant capture experiment can be performed with beam energies as low as $\mathcal{O}(10\,\mathrm{TeV})$ per target nucleon. Unfortunately, none of the ion systems discussed here can provide sufficient statistics to discover the cosmic neutrino background with current technology. We address the challenges associated with realising this experiment in the future, taking into account the uncertainty in the beam and neutrino momentum distributions, synchrotron radiation, as well as the beam stability.
Highlights
Neutrinos travel through the cosmos with minimal interactions with their environment, which makes them clean messengers of solar, astrophysical and cosmic phenomena
Low-energy neutrinos are challenging in this respect, making a future detection of the cosmic neutrino background ðCνBÞ the holy grail of neutrino physics
The most discussed proposal to detect the CνB was originally suggested by Weinberg [2], which looks for an excess of events beyond the tritium beta decay electron endpoint energy, arising from neutrino capture process 3H þ νe → 3Heþ þ e−
Summary
Neutrinos travel through the cosmos with minimal interactions with their environment, which makes them clean messengers of solar, astrophysical and cosmic phenomena. We explore the sensitivity of an ion storage ring exploiting resonant, neutrino-induced beta decays and electron captures to detect cosmic neutrinos. Such an experiment could perform various measurements. In the case of resonant capture of neutrinos produced in beta beams, the neutrino capture cross section for tritium exceeds the PTOLEMY cross section by seven orders of magnitude [16]. This technique can be used to capture low-energy neutrinos using accelerated ions instead. For our calculations of the solar neutrino flux we use the standard solar model given in [27], which we discuss further in Appendix B
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