Conditions for Statistical Determination of the Neutrino Mass Spectrum in Radiative Emission of Neutrino Pairs in Atoms

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the feasibility of using atomic radiative emission of neutrino pairs (RENP) to determine neutrino mass properties, concluding that current technological limitations make practical implementation challenging.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the experimental conditions needed for neutrino spectrum determination via RENP, highlighting the significant technological hurdles involved.

Findings

Determination of neutrino parameters requires days to years of experimental data.

Current technology is insufficient to achieve the ideal conditions for RENP.

The method demands extremely large target coherence and atom densities.

Abstract

The photon spectrum in macrocoherent atomic de-excitation via radiative emission of neutrino pairs (RENP) has been proposed as a sensitive probe of the neutrino mass spectrum, capable of competing with conventional neutrino experiments. In this paper we revisit this intriguing technique in order to quantify the requirements for statistical determination of some of the properties of the neutrino spectrum, in particular the neutrino mass scale and the mass ordering. Our results are sobering. We find that, even under ideal conditions, the determination of neutrino parameters needs experimental live times of the order of days to years for several laser frequencies, assuming a target of volume of order 100 cm3 containing about 10^21 atoms per cubic centimeter in a totally coherent state with maximum value of the electric field in the target. Such conditions seem to be, as of today, way beyond the reach of our current technology.