English

Wolfenstein potentials for neutrinos induced by ultra-light mediators

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2021-01-19 v4

Abstract

New physics can emerge at low energy scales, involving very light and very weakly interacting new particles. These particles can mediate interactions between neutrinos and usual matter and contribute to the Wolfenstein potential relevant for neutrino oscillations. We compute the Wolfenstein potential in the presence of ultra-light scalar and vector mediators and study the dependence of the potential on the mediator mass mAm_A, taking the finite size of matter distribution (Earth, Sun, supernovae) into consideration. For ultra-light mediators with mA1m_{A}^{-1} comparable to the size of the medium (RR), the usual mA2m_{A}^{-2} dependence of the potential is modified. In particular, when mA1Rm_{A}^{-1}\gg R, the potential does not depend on mAm_{A}. Taking into account existing bounds on light mediators, we find that for the scalar case significant effects on neutrino propagation are not possible, while for the vector case large matter effects are allowed for mA[2×1017m_{A} \in [2\times10^{-17}, 4×1014]4\times10^{-14}] eV and the gauge coupling g1025g\sim 10^{-25}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.07505,
  title  = {Wolfenstein potentials for neutrinos induced by ultra-light mediators},
  author = {Alexei Yu. Smirnov and Xun-Jie Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.07505},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

12 pages, 2 figures, typos in Eqs.(2), (5), and (23) corrected