English

Neutrino force at all length scales

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-12-19 v2 Atomic Physics

Abstract

The Standard Model predicts a long-range force mediated by a pair of neutrinos, known as ``the neutrino force". It scales as GF2/r5G_F^2/r^5, where GFG_F is the Fermi constant. However, as rGFr \lesssim \sqrt{G_F}, the four-Fermi theory breaks down and the neutrino force no longer has the 1/r51/r^5 scaling. For the first time, we derive a complete expression for the neutrino force that is valid at all distances. For rGFr \gg \sqrt{G_F}, the result reduces to the known GF2/r5G_F^2/r^5; for rGFr \ll \sqrt{G_F}, it scales as 1/r1/r. We explore the implications of this result for atomic parity violation (APV) experiments. A key feature of the neutrino force is that it is a long-range effect compared to the atomic length scale. Thus, in general, it cannot be simply treated as a correction to the tree-level ZZ-exchange diagram without considering the atomic wavefunctions. We calculate the effects in muonium and positronium, finding that the neutrino force contributes about 4\% and 16\%, respectively, compared to the leading Z Z exchange. This indicates a significant impact on APV, with important implications for detecting the neutrino force and measuring the weak mixing angle in APV experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.19059,
  title  = {Neutrino force at all length scales},
  author = {Mitrajyoti Ghosh and Yuval Grossman and Chinhsan Sieng and Bingrong Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.19059},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

56 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables; v2: a new appendix added to generalize the dispersion formalism for calculating quantum potentials, results unchanged, matches journal version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:34:45.097Z