Updated detection prospects for relic neutrinos using coherent scattering

TL;DR

This paper reviews methods for detecting relic neutrinos via coherent scattering, highlighting a mass-squared scaling of acceleration and a significant contribution from neutrino-electron interactions, but concludes current technology is insufficient.

Contribution

It demonstrates the acceleration scales with neutrino mass squared and identifies the dominant role of neutrino-electron scattering in detection prospects.

Findings

Acceleration scales with neutrino mass squared.

Neutrino-electron scattering can dominate over neutrino-nucleus interactions.

Current experiments are inadequate for relic neutrino detection.

Abstract

We review the existing proposals to detect relic neutrinos using the coherent scattering of a neutrino wind on a test mass. By considering the transformation of the neutrino momentum between reference frames, we demonstrate that the induced acceleration scales with the square of the neutrino mass for unclustered neutrinos, contrary to the existing literature. In addition, we show that there is a large contribution to this effect from coherent neutrino-electron scattering, which can exceed the neutrino-nucleus component by nearly an order of magnitude. Unfortunately, we find that even with this enhancement there are no existing experiments or proposals capable of detecting relic neutrinos using this method.