The potential of directional neutrino detection to observe neutrino spin oscillations

TL;DR

This paper explores how directional neutrino detection can reveal neutrino spin oscillations caused by a magnetic moment, through azimuthal asymmetries in scattering experiments.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of directional detection methods to observe neutrino spin oscillations via azimuthal asymmetries in low-energy scattering.

Findings

Azimuthal asymmetry arises from superposition of helicity states.

Numerical results show measurable asymmetries in scattering on various targets.

Directional detection can uniquely observe neutrino spin oscillations.

Abstract

A nonzero neutrino magnetic moment arises already in the minimally extended Standard Model with right-handed massive Dirac neutrinos. The well-known consequence of the neutrino magnetic moment is the phenomenon of neutrino spin oscillations in a magnetic field. It can manifest itself not only as a lack in the flux of active cosmic neutrinos arriving on Earth but also as characteristic features in low-energy neutrino elastic scattering processes. Following our approach developed earlier, in this work we study the influence of arbitrary spin-flavor state of incoming neutrino on low-energy neutrino scattering off different particles in a detector. We demonstrate that superposition of left- and right-handed helicity neutrino states gives rise to an azimuthal asymmetry in the angular distribution of the recoil momenta. We present numerical calculations for elastic neutrino scattering on electrons, protons and 40Ar and 132Xe nuclei, demonstrating the azimuthal-asymmetry effect. Our results indicate the unique potential of directional neutrino detection to observe the neutrino spin oscillations.