Radiative Emission of Neutrino Pairs in Atoms and Light Sterile Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper explores how atomic radiative emission of neutrino pairs (RENP) can be used to detect eV-scale sterile neutrinos, analyzing the phenomenology within a 3+1 neutrino mixing scheme and its implications for neutrino mass and nature.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of RENP as a method to test for sterile neutrinos in the 3+1 scheme, linking atomic physics experiments to neutrino oscillation hints.

Findings

RENP can be sensitive to eV-scale sterile neutrinos.

The analysis shows potential signatures of sterile neutrinos in RENP spectra.

The study connects atomic processes with neutrino mass and mixing parameters.

Abstract

The process of Radiative Emission of Neutrino Pair (RENP) in atoms is sensitive to the absolute neutrino mass scale, the type of spectrum neutrino masses obey and the nature - Dirac or Majorana - of massive neutrinos. We analyse the possibility to test the hypothesis of existence of neutrinos with masses at the eV scale coupled to the electron in the weak charged lepton current in an RENP experiment. The presence of eV scale neutrinos in the neutrino mixing is associated with the existence of sterile neutrinos which mix with the active flavour neutrinos. At present there are a number of hints for active-sterile neutrino oscillations driven by $\Delta m^2 \sim 1~{\rm eV^2}$. We perform a detailed analysis of the RENP phenomenology within the "3 + 1" scheme with one sterile neutrino.