Observing relic neutrinos using an accelerator experiment

by Dr Jack Shergold

Thursday 1 Jul 2021, 15:00 → 17:00 Europe/Zurich

zoom only (CERN)

We present a new technique for observing low energy
neutrinos with the aim of detecting the cosmic neutrino background
using ion storage rings. Utilising high energy targets exploits the
quadratic increase in the neutrino capture cross section with beam
energy, and with sufficient beam energy, enables neutrino capture
through inverse-beta decay processes from a stable initial state. We
also show that there exist ion systems admitting resonant neutrino
capture, capable of achieving larger capture cross sections at lower
beam energies than their non-resonant counterparts. We calculate the
neutrino capture rate and the optimal experimental runtime for a range
of different resonant processes and target ions and we demonstrate that
the resonant capture experiment can be performed with beam energies as
low as O(10TeV) per target nucleon. Unfortunately, none of the ion
systems discussed here can provide sufficient statistics to discover
the cosmic neutrino background with current technology. We address the
challenges associated with realising this experiment in the future,
taking into account the uncertainty in the beam and neutrino momentum
distributions, synchrotron radiation, as well as the beam stability.