Testing the Fifth Force on Lepton Spins through Neutrino Oscillations

TL;DR

This paper explores how a hypothetical fifth force mediated by a light vector boson could influence neutrino oscillations and lepton spins, providing new constraints from neutrino experiments that surpass previous spin sensor limits.

Contribution

It demonstrates that neutrino oscillation data can significantly constrain fifth forces coupling to leptons, especially for muons, extending the reach beyond existing spin sensor experiments.

Findings

Neutrino oscillations constrain fifth force couplings to electrons and muons.

Solar and reactor neutrino data set bounds comparable or superior to spin sensors.

Neutrino data exclude fifth force explanations for the muon g-2 anomaly.

Abstract

We investigate a fifth force mediated by a light vector boson that couples to lepton spins, characterized by axial-vector couplings to leptons and vector couplings to nucleons. This interaction generates a potential proportional to the inner product of the lepton spin vector and the nucleon-lepton relative velocity vector, a feature extensively explored with precision spin sensors. Employing weak symmetry, we show that left-handed charged lepton couplings naturally extend to left-handed neutrinos, enabling this fifth force to influence neutrino oscillations. For electron-nucleon couplings, we find that solar and reactor neutrino experiments provide comparable constraints to those from spin sensors and surpass them in the short-range fifth force region. For muon-nucleon couplings, neutrino oscillation experiments exclude the fifth force as a viable explanation for the muon $ g-2 $ anomaly in the context of a vector mediator, tightening the bounds by two orders of magnitude in coupling strength by solar and atmospheric neutrino data. Our results highlight the critical role of neutrino oscillations in probing fifth forces acting across all three generations of lepton spins.