English

Probing neutrino-night-quark effective scalar interactions from neutrino masses

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-03-23 v2

Abstract

In this work, we use neutrino masses as a probe of the neutrino-light-quark effective scalar interactions. It is found that neutrinos can acquire masses not only from the usual light quark loop corrections but also from the light quark condensates. The latter contribution has been overlooked in the literature. We show that both contributions are comparable for operators involving uu and dd quarks, while quark loop corrections dominate for operators involving the ss quark. Using the low-energy effective field theory extended with light right-handed neutrinos and matching to chiral perturbation theory, we systematically analyze these contributions, deriving constraints on the corresponding Wilson coefficients from neutrino mass bounds, coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, and light pseudoscalar meson invisible decays. Our analysis shows that electron neutrino mass measurements provide the most stringent constraints on these scalar couplings, significantly improving upon limits from other observables. The results highlight the importance of including both perturbative and nonperturbative contributions in complete phenomenological analyses of neutrino mass generation mechanisms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.01947,
  title  = {Probing neutrino-night-quark effective scalar interactions from neutrino masses},
  author = {Feng-Zhi Chen and Junlin Huang and Fanrong Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.01947},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages, version for PRD publication