The Scintillating Bubble Chamber (SBC) collaboration is developing liquid-noble bubble chambers for the detection of sub-keV nuclear recoils. These detectors benefit from the electron recoil rejection inherent in moderately-superheated bubble chambers with the addition of energy reconstruction provided from the scintillation signal. The ability to measure low-energy nuclear recoils allows the search for GeV-scale dark matter and the measurement of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering on argon from MeV-scale reactor antineutrinos. The first physics-scale detector, SBC-LAr10, is in the commissioning phase at Fermilab, where extensive engineering and calibration studies will be performed. In parallel, a functionally identical low-background version, SBC-SNOLAB, is being built for a dark matter search underground at SNOLAB. SBC-SNOLAB, with a 10 kg-yr exposure, will have sensitivity to a dark matter–nucleon cross section of 2×10−42 cm2 at 1 GeV/c2 dark matter mass, and future detectors could reach the boundary of the argon neutrino fog with a tonne-yr exposure. In addition, the deployment of an SBC detector at a nuclear reactor could enable neutrino physics investigations including measurements of the weak mixing angle and searches for sterile neutrinos, the neutrino magnetic moment, and the light Z’ gauge boson.
Neutrinos in Astrophysics and Cosmology
I introduce the consequences of neutrino mass and mixing in the dense environments of the early Universe and in astrophysical environments. Thermal and matter effects are reviewed in the context of a two-neutrino formalism, with methods of extension to multiple neutrinos. The observed large neutrino mixing angles place the strongest constraint on cosmological lepton (or neutrino) asymmetries, while new sterile neutrinos provide a wealth of possible new physics, including lepton asymmetry generation as well as candidates for dark matter. I also review cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure constraints on neutrino mass and energy density. Lastly, I review how X-ray astronomy has become a branch of neutrino physics in searches for keV-scale sterile neutrino dark matter radiative decay.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1915005
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10347845
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Theoretical Advanced Study Institute (TASI) 2020
- Volume:
- TASI2020
- Issue:
- 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 001
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
Baracchini, Elisabetta (Ed.)more » « less
-
The possibility of dark matter being a particle involved in the generation of neutrino mass has been of interest for over 25 years. Sterile neutrinos—or in the contemporary parlance—dark fermions, are among the simplest and most cited particles which can provide a mechanism for neutrino mass. If one particle of this class has a small mixing, it can be quasi-thermally or nonthermally produced in the early Universe, affect cosmological structure formation, and be detected by X-ray telescopes or laboratory nuclear experiments. A candidate line was detected in 2014, and I review the status of the line and its implications for galaxy formation, proposals for future observations, and laboratory detection.more » « less
-
Probing self-interacting sterile neutrino dark matter with the diffuse supernova neutrino backgroundThe neutrinos in the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB) travel over cosmological distances and this provides them with an excellent opportunity to interact with dark relics. We show that a cosmologically significant relic population of keV-mass sterile neutrinos with strong self-interactions could imprint their presence in the DSNB. The signatures of the self-interactions would be “dips” in the otherwise smooth DSNB spectrum. Upcoming large-scale neutrino detectors, for example Hyper-Kamiokande, have a good chance of detecting the DSNB and these dips. If no dips are detected, this method serves as an independent constraint on the sterile neutrino self-interaction strength and mixing with active neutrinos. We show that relic sterile neutrino parameters that evade x-ray and structure bounds may nevertheless be testable by future detectors like TRISTAN, but may also produce dips in the DSNB which could be detectable. Such a detection would suggest the existence of a cosmologically significant, strongly self-interacting sterile neutrino background, likely embedded in a richer dark sector.more » « less
-
A bstract We propose a baryogenenesis mechanism that uses a rotating condensate of a Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry breaking field and the dimension-five operator that gives Majorana neutrino masses. The rotation induces charge asymmetries for the Higgs boson and for lepton chirality through sphaleron processes and Yukawa interactions. The dimension-five interaction transfers these asymmetries to the lepton asymmetry, which in turn is transferred into the baryon asymmetry through the electroweak sphaleron process. QCD axion dark matter can be simultaneously produced by dynamics of the same PQ field via kinetic misalignment or parametric resonance, favoring an axion decay constant f a ≲ 10 10 GeV, or by conventional misalignment and contributions from strings and domain walls with f a ∼ 10 11 GeV. The size of the baryon asymmetry is tied to the mass of the PQ field. In simple supersymmetric theories, it is independent of UV parameters and predicts the supersymmtry breaking mass scale to be $$ \mathcal{O} $$ O (10 − 10 4 ) TeV, depending on the masses of the neutrinos and whether the condensate is thermalized during a radiation or matter dominated era. The high supersymmetry breaking mass scale may be free from cosmological and flavor/CP problems. We also construct a theory where TeV scale supersymmetry is possible. Parametric resonance may give warm axions, and the radial component of the PQ field may give signals in rare kaon decays from mixing with the Higgs and in dark radiation.more » « less
-
A bstract The future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, along with its primary capacity to elucidate the nuclear structure, will offer new opportunities to probe physics beyond the Standard Model coupled to the electroweak sector. Among the best motivated examples of such new physics are new heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), which are likely to play a key role in neutrino mass generation and lepton number violation. We study the capability of the EIC to search for HNLs, which can be produced in electron- proton collisions through charged current interactions as a consequence of their mixing with light neutrinos. We find that, with the EIC design energy and integrated luminosity, one is able to probe HNLs in the mass range of 1 – 100 GeV with mixing angles down to the order of 10 − 4 − 10 − 3 through the prompt decay signatures, and in the mass range of 1 10 GeV with | U e | 2 ~ 10 − 6 – 10 − 4 via the displaced decay signatures. We also consider the invisible mode where an HNL is undetected or decaying to dark sector particles. One could potentially probe heavy HNLs for mixing angles in the window 10 − 3 – 10 − 2 , provided SM background systematics can be brought under control. These searches are complementary to other probes of HNLs, such as neutrino-less double- β decay, meson decay, fixed-target, and high-energy collider experiments.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.22323/1.388.0001
