Can INO be Sensitive to Flavor-Dependent Long-Range Forces?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how flavor-dependent long-range forces mediated by ultra-light bosons could influence neutrino oscillations and demonstrates that the ICAL detector at INO can significantly improve constraints on these forces compared to existing bounds.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of flavor-dependent long-range forces on neutrino oscillations and sets new, stringent limits on the gauge coupling constants using ICAL data.

Findings

ICAL can constrain the gauge coupling to less than 1.2×10^{-53} at 90% C.L.

Constraints from ICAL are 46-53 times stronger than Super-Kamiokande bounds.

Long-range forces can significantly modify neutrino survival probabilities.

Abstract

Flavor-dependent long-range leptonic forces mediated by the ultra-light and neutral bosons associated with gauged $L_e-L_\mu$ or $L_e-L_\tau$ symmetry constitute a minimal extension of the Standard Model. In presence of these new anomaly free abelian symmetries, the SM remains invariant and renormalizable, and can lead to interesting phenomenological consequences. For an example, the electrons inside the Sun can generate a flavor-dependent long-range potential at the Earth surface, which can enhance $\nu_\mu$ and $\bar\nu_\mu$ survival probabilities over a wide range of energies and baselines in atmospheric neutrino experiments. In this paper, we explore in detail the possible impacts of these long-range flavor-diagonal neutral current interactions due to $L_e-L_\mu$ and $L_e-L_\tau$ symmetries (one at-a-time) in the context of proposed 50 kt magnetized ICAL detector at INO. Combining the information on muon momentum and hadron energy on an event-by-event basis, ICAL can place stringent constraints on the effective gauge coupling $\alpha_{e\mu/e\tau}<1.2\times 10^{-53}$ ($1.75\times 10^{-53}$) at 90$\%$ (3$\sigma$) C.L. with 500 kt$\cdot$yr exposure. The 90$\%$ C.L. limit on $\alpha_{e\mu}$ ($\alpha_{e\tau}$) from ICAL is $\sim 46$ (53) times better than the existing bound from the Super-Kamiokande experiment.