Efficiently Extracting Energy from Cosmological Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential for detecting the Cosmic Neutrino Background by using dense target arrays and motion-sensitive circuits to capture the energy transfer from low-energy cosmological neutrinos, which could open new insights into the early universe.

Contribution

It proposes a novel detector concept utilizing dense targets and motion-sensitive circuits to improve the feasibility of cosmological neutrino detection.

Findings

Dense targets can enhance neutrino interaction cross sections.

Motion-sensitive circuits could detect energy transfer from neutrinos.

A large array of such detectors might enable practical CNB detection.

Abstract

Detecting the extremely low-energy neutrinos that form the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) presents many experimental challenges, but pursuing this elusive goal is still worthwhile because these weakly-interacting particles could provide a new window into the structure and composition of the early universe. This report examines whether cosmological neutrinos can deposit sufficient energy into a target system to be detectable with plausible extensions of current bolometric technologies. While the macroscopic wavelengths of cosmological neutrinos can greatly enhance their cross sections with dense targets, such interactions can only be detectable if they transfer a significant fraction of each neutrino's kinetic energy into the detector system. We find that a large array of dense target masses coupled to suitable motion-sensitive circuits could potentially satisfy both of these conditions and thus might be able to serve as the basis for a more practical cosmological neutrino detector.