Spin-Flavor Oscillations of Relic Neutrinos in Primordial Magnetic Field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how primordial magnetic fields could induce spin-flavor oscillations in relic neutrinos, potentially converting active neutrinos into sterile ones before galaxy formation, with implications for neutrino physics and cosmology.

Contribution

It demonstrates that primordial magnetic fields can cause significant active-sterile neutrino conversions via spin-flavor oscillations, even within current experimental bounds on neutrino magnetic moments.

Findings

Half of relic neutrinos can become sterile due to spin-flavor oscillations.

Active-sterile conversion occurs before galaxy formation and is influenced by primordial magnetic field strength.

Conversion is possible even if neutrino magnetic moments are near Standard Model values.

Abstract

The neutrino magnetic moment operator clasps a tiny but non-zero value within the standard model (SM) of particle physics and rather enhanced values in various new physics models. This generation of the magnetic moment ($\mu_\nu$) is through quantum loop corrections which can exhibit spin-flavor oscillations in the presence of an external magnetic field. Also, several studies predict the existence of a primordial magnetic field (PMF) in the early universe, extending back to the era of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and before. The recent NANOGrav measurement can be considered as a strong indication of the presence of these PMFs. In this work, we consider the effect of the PMF on the flux of relic neutrinos. For Dirac neutrinos, we show that half of the active relic neutrinos can become sterile due to spin-flavor oscillations well before becoming non-relativistic owing to the expansion of the Universe and also before the timeline of the formation of galaxies and hence intergalactic fields, subject to the constraints on the combined value of $\mu_\nu$ and the cosmic magnetic field at the time of neutrino decoupling. For the upper limit of PMF allowed by the BBN, this can be true even if the experimental bounds on $\mu_{\nu}$ approaches a few times its SM value.