English

Flavor Triangle of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2021-05-20 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Although Galactic core-collapse supernovae (SNe) only happen a few times per century, every hour a vast number of explosions happen in the whole universe, emitting energy in the form of neutrinos, resulting in the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB). The DSNB has not yet been detected, but Super-Kamiokande doped with gadolinium is expected to yield the first statistically significant observation within the next several years. Since the neutrinos produced at the core collapse undergo mixing during their propagation to Earth, the flavor content at detection is a test of oscillation physics. In this paper, we estimate the expected DSNB data at the DUNE, Hyper-K and JUNO experiments which when combined are sensitive to all different neutrino flavors. We determine how well the flavor content of the DSNB will be reconstructed in the future, for a Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) scenario as well as a neutrino decay scenario. A large fraction of the flavor space will be excluded, but the heavy-lepton neutrino flux remains a challenge.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.10933,
  title  = {Flavor Triangle of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background},
  author = {Zahra Tabrizi and Shunsaku Horiuchi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.10933},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

22 pages, 11 figures, v2: references and comments added, analysis improved, agrees the version published in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:25:16.874Z