English

LIQUIDating the Gallium Anomaly

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-07-11 v1

Abstract

The gallium anomaly has a global significance of greater than 5σ5\sigma. Most viable BSM solutions quickly run into strong tensions with reactor and solar neutrino data. We propose to use indium (115In{}^{115}\text{In}) as a target as it offers a low threshold and reasonably high cross section. The neutrino-indium charged current cross section can be calibrated using the well-constrained solar 7Be{}^{7}\text{Be} neutrino flux that lies very close in energy to the 51Cr{}^{51}\text{Cr} neutrino lines. The triple coincidence provided by 115In{}^{115}\text{In} neutrino capture can be fully exploited by an opaque scintillation detector that also provides energy and position information. We show that a 100100 ton indium target combined with 2 source runs of a 3.43.4 MCi 51Cr{}^{51}\text{Cr} source can probe the complete parameter space of the gallium anomaly, both in the context of a vanilla sterile neutrino as well as more involved BSM scenarios.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.07397,
  title  = {LIQUIDating the Gallium Anomaly},
  author = {Garv Chauhan and Patrick Huber},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.07397},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:54:10.258Z