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DOE OSTI2021

Astrophysical neutrino self-interactions in the high-statistics era

Do neutrinos have sizable self-interactions? They might. Laboratory constraints are weak, so strong effects are possible in astrophysical environments and the early universe. Observations with neutrino telescopes can provide an independent probe of neutrino self (“secret”) interactions, as the sources are distant and the cosmic neutrino background intervenes. We define a roadmap for making decisive progress on testing these interactions. This progress will be enabled by IceCube-Gen2 observations of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. Critical to this is our comprehensive treatment of the theory, taking into account previously neglected or overly approximated effects, as well as including realistic detection physics. We show that IceCube-Gen2 can realize the full potential of neutrino astronomy for testing neutrino self-interactions, being sensitive to cosmologically relevant interaction models.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Establishing accretion flares from supermassive black holes as a source of high-energy neutrinos

ABSTRACT The origin of cosmic high-energy neutrinos remains largely unexplained. For high-energy neutrino alerts from IceCube, a coincidence with time-variable emission has been seen for three different types of accreting black holes: (1) a gamma-ray flare from a blazar (TXS 0506+056), (2) an optical transient following a stellar tidal disruption event (TDE; AT2019dsg), and (3) an optical outburst from an active galactic nucleus (AGN; AT2019fdr). For the latter two sources, infrared follow-up observations revealed a powerful reverberation signal due to dust heated by the flare. This discovery motivates a systematic study of neutrino emission from all supermassive black hole with similar dust echoes. Because dust reprocessing is agnostic to the origin of the outburst, our work unifies TDEs and high-amplitude flares from AGN into a population that we dub accretion flares. Besides the two known events, we uncover a third flare that is coincident with a PeV-scale neutrino (AT2019aalc). Based solely on the optical and infrared properties, we estimate a significance of 3.6σ for this association of high-energy neutrinos with three accretion flares. Our results imply that at least ∼10 per cent of the IceCube high-energy neutrino alerts could be due to accretion flares. This is surprising because the sum of the fluence of these flares is at least three orders of magnitude lower compared to the total fluence of normal AGN. It thus appears that the efficiency of high-energy neutrino production in accretion flares is increased compared to non-flaring AGN. We speculate that this can be explained by the high Eddington ratio of the flares.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2019

On the occurrence of fast neutrino flavor conversions in multidimensional supernova models

The dense neutrino medium in a core-collapse supernova or a neutron-star merger event can experience fast flavor conversions on time/distance scales that are much smaller than those of vacuum oscillations. It is believed that fast neutrino flavor transformation occurs in the region where the angular distributions of ν e and v¯ e cross each other. We present the first study of this crossing phenomenon and the fast neutrino flavor conversions in multidimensional (multi-D) supernova models. We examine the neutrino distributions obtained by solving the Boltzmann transport equation for several fixed profiles which are representative snapshots taken from separate 2D and 3D supernova simulations with an 11.2 M ⊙ progenitor model. Our research shows that the spherically asymmetric patterns of the ν e and v¯ e fluxes in multi-D models can assist the appearance of the crossing between the ν e and v¯ e angular distributions. In the models that we have studied, there exist unstable neutrino oscillation modes in and beyond the neutrino decoupling region which have amplitude growth rates as large as an e-fold per nanosecond. Here, this finding can have important consequences for the explosion mechanism, nucleosynthesis, and neutrino signals of core-collapse supernovae.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Rocks, water, and noble liquids: Unfolding the flavor contents of supernova neutrinos

Measuring core-collapse supernova neutrinos, both from individual supernovae within the Milky Way and from past core collapses throughout the Universe (the diffuse supernova neutrino background, or DSNB), is one of the main goals of current and next generation neutrino experiments. Detecting the heavy-lepton flavor (muon and tau types, collectively v x ) component of the flux is particularly challenging due to small statistics and large backgrounds. Further, while the next galactic neutrino burst will be observed in a plethora of neutrino channels, allowing us to measure a small number of v x events, only upper limits are anticipated for the diffuse v x flux even after decades of data taking with conventional detectors. However, paleo detectors could measure the time-integrated flux of neutrinos from galactic core-collapse supernovae via flavor-blind neutral current interactions. In this work, we show how combining a measurement of the average galactic core-collapse supernova flux with paleo detectors and measurements of the DSNB electron-type neutrino fluxes with the next-generation water Cherenkov detector Hyper-Kamiokande and the liquid noble gas detector DUNE will allow to determine the mean supernova vx flux parameters with precision of order ten percent. Realizing this potential requires both the cosmic supernova rate out to z~1 and the integrated Galactic supernova rate over the last ~1 Gyr to be established at the ~10% level.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Neutron detection and application with a novel 3D-projection scintillator tracker in the future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments

Neutrino oscillation experiments require a precise measurement of the neutrino energy. However, the kinematic detection of the final-state neutron in the neutrino interaction is missing in current neutrino oscillation experiments. The missing neutron kinematic detection results in a smaller detected neutrino energy than the true neutrino energy. A novel 3D-projection scintillator tracker, which consists of roughly ten million active cubes covered with an optical reflector, is capable of measuring the neutron kinetic energy and direction on an event-by-event basis using the time-of-flight technique thanks to the fast timing, fine granularity, and high light yield. The $\overline{v}$ μ interactions tend to produce neutrons in the final state. By measuring the neutron kinetic energy, the $\overline{v}$ μ energy can be reconstructed better, allowing a tighter incoming neutrino flux constraint. This article shows the detector's ability to reconstruct neutron kinetic energy and the $\overline{v}$ μ flux constraint achieved by selecting the charged-current interactions without mesons or protons in the final state.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Collapse of neutrino wave functions under Penrose gravitational reduction

Models of spontaneous wave function collapse have been postulated to address the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Their primary function is to convert coherent quantum superpositions into incoherent ones, with the result that macroscopic objects cannot be placed into widely separated superpositions for observably prolonged times. Many of these processes will also lead to loss of coherence in neutrino oscillations, producing observable signatures in the flavor profile of neutrinos at long travel distances. The majority of studies of neutrino oscillation coherence to date have focused on variants of the continuous state localization model, whereby an effective decoherence strength parameter is used to model the rate of coherence loss with an assumed energy dependence. Another class of collapse models that have been proposed posit connections to the configuration of gravitational field accompanying the mass distribution associated with each wave function that is in the superposition. A particularly interesting and prescriptive model is Penrose’s description of gravitational collapse which proposes a decoherence time τ determined through E g τ ∼ ℏ , where E g is a calculable function of the Newtonian gravitational potential. Here we explore application of the Penrose collapse model to neutrino oscillations, reinterpreting previous experimental limits on neutrino decoherence in terms of this model. We identify effects associated with both spatial collapse and momentum diffusion, finding that the latter is ruled out in data from the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory so long as the neutrino wave packet width at production is σ ν , x ≤ 2 × 10 − 12 m . Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2024

Improving neutrino energy estimation of charged-current interaction events with recurrent neural networks in MicroBooNE

We present a deep learning-based method for estimating the neutrino energy of charged-current neutrino-argon interactions. We employ a recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture for neutrino energy estimation in the MicroBooNE experiment, utilizing liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) detector technology. Traditional energy estimation approaches in LArTPCs, which largely rely on reconstructing and summing visible energies, often experience sizable biases and resolution smearing because of the complex nature of neutrino interactions and the detector response. The estimation of neutrino energy can be improved after considering the kinematics information of reconstructed final-state particles. Utilizing kinematic information of reconstructed particles, the deep learning-based approach shows improved resolution and reduced bias for the muon neutrino Monte Carlo simulation sample compared to the traditional approach. In order to address the common concern about the effectiveness of this method on experimental data, the RNN-based energy estimator is further examined and validated with dedicated data-simulation consistency tests using MicroBooNE data. We also assess its potential impact on a neutrino oscillation study after accounting for all statistical and systematic uncertainties and show that it enhances physics sensitivity. This method has good potential to improve the performance of other physics analyses. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2015

Readout strategies for directional dark matter detection beyond the neutrino background

The search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) by direct detection faces an encroaching background due to coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering. As the sensitivity of these experiments improves, the question of how to best distinguish a dark matter signal from neutrinos will become increasingly important. A proposed method of overcoming this so-called 'neutrino floor' is to utilize the directional signature that both neutrino and dark matter induced recoils possess. We show that directional experiments can indeed probe WIMP-nucleon cross-sections below the neutrino floor with little loss in sensitivity due to the neutrino background. In particular we find at low WIMP masses (around 6 GeV) the discovery limits for directional detectors penetrate below the non-directional limit by several orders of magnitude. For high WIMP masses (around 100 GeV), the non-directional limit is overcome by a factor of a few. Furthermore we show that even for directional detectors which can only measure 1- or 2-dimensional projections of the 3-dimensional recoil track, the discovery potential is only reduced by a factor of 3 at most. We also demonstrate that while the experimental limitations of directional detectors, such as sense recognition and finite angular resolution, have a detrimental effect on the discovery limits, it is still possible to overcome the ultimate neutrino background faced by non-directional detectors.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Dark matter and neutrino mass from the smallest non-Abelian chiral dark sector

All pieces of concrete evidence for phenomena outside the standard model (SM)—neutrino masses and dark matter—are consistent with the existence of new degrees of freedom that interact very weakly, if at all, with those in the SM. Here we propose that these new degrees of freedom organize themselves into a simple dark sector, a chiral SU(3) × SU(2) gauge theory with the smallest nontrivial fermion content. Similar to the SM, the dark SU(2) is spontaneously broken while the dark SU(3) confines at low energies. At the renormalizable level, the dark sector contains massless fermions—dark leptons—and stable massive particles—dark protons. We find that dark protons with masses between 10 and 100 TeV satisfy all current cosmological and astrophysical observations concerning dark matter even if dark protons are a symmetric thermal relic. The dark leptons play the role of right-handed neutrinos and allow simple realizations of the seesaw mechanism or the possibility that neutrinos are Dirac fermions. In the latter case, neutrino masses are also parametrically different from charged-fermion masses and the lightest neutrino is predicted to be massless. Since the new “neutrino” and “dark-matter” degrees of freedom interact with one another, these two new-physics phenomena are intertwined. Dark leptons play a nontrivial role in early Universe cosmology while indirect searches for dark matter involve, decisively, dark-matter annihilations into dark leptons. These, in turn, may lead to observable signatures at high-energy neutrino and gamma-ray observatories, especially once one accounts for the potential Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation cross section, derived from the low-energy dark-sector effective theory, a possibility we explore quantitatively in some detail.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Open system approach to neutrinos propagating in an ultralight scalar background

We examine decoherence in neutrino oscillations induced by an ultralight scalar field coupled to neutrinos. The scalar induces time- and position-dependent shifts in the neutrino mass matrix. Neutrinos sample different field configurations throughout an experimental data-taking period, which leads to damping effects in the oscillation pattern in the form of decoherence. By recasting the neutrino-scalar dynamics within the open quantum systems framework, we establish a mapping between a complete model and phenomenological decoherence approaches. We find that the parameter driving decoherence scales as L 2 / E 2 , where L is the baseline and E is the neutrino energy, as opposed to L / E typically assumed in phenomenological studies of open system approaches to neutrino oscillations.

F.T. Airoldi, Lua [Sao Paulo U.; Fermilab] (ORCID:↗
DOE OSTI2022

Sterile Neutrinos: Are They Real?

Neutrinos are perhaps the least understood of the known denizens of the subatomic world. They have nearly no mass, interact only via the weak nuclear force and gravity, and, perhaps most surprising, the three known species of neutrinos can transform from one variant into another. This transformation, called neutrino oscillation, has been demonstrated only relatively recently and has led to speculation that there might be another, even more mysterious, neutrino variant, called the sterile neutrino. While the sterile neutrino remains a hypothetical particle, it is an interesting one and searches for it are a key research focus of the world’s neutrino scientist community.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Detection of astrophysical tau neutrino candidates in IceCube

High-energy tau neutrinos are rarely produced in atmospheric cosmic-ray showers or at cosmic particle accelerators, but are expected to emerge during neutrino propagation over cosmic distances due to flavor mixing. When high energy tau neutrinos interact inside the IceCube detector, two spatially separated energy depositions may be resolved, the first from the charged current interaction and the second from the tau lepton decay. We report a novel analysis of 7.5 years of IceCube data that identifies two candidate tau neutrinos among the 60 “High-Energy Starting Events” (HESE) collected during that period. The HESE sample offers high purity, all-sky sensitivity, and distinct observational signatures for each neutrino flavor, enabling a new measurement of the flavor composition. The measured astrophysical neutrino flavor composition is consistent with expectations, and an astrophysical tau neutrino flux is indicated at 2.8σ significance.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2021

From Gargamelle to MINERvA: exploring the structure of the nucleon with neutrinos

Neutrino scattering experiments have been exploring the structure of the nucleon with Deep-Inelastic Scattering for over 50 years. Although hints of nucleon structure were available using CERN’s first neutrino beam in the 1960s, the study actually started quantitatively in the early 1970s with the Gargamelle heavy liquid bubble chamber that produced first neutrino confirmation of scaling. This study of nucleon structure continued with both bubble chambers and more massive electronic detectors that, with higher energy neutrino beams and $Q^2$ reach, examined the breaking of this scaling while testing Quantum Chromodynamics. Here, a significant factor when including neutrino explorations of nucleon structure in the overall picture is that to gather significant statistics, neutrino experiments have had to use heavier nuclear targets. It has been experimentally demonstrated that the structure of the nucleon in the nuclear environment is indeed different than the free nucleon structure. Understanding this modified structure has played an important part in the experimental and theoretical exploration of nucleon structure by neutrinos and is one of the important goals of the on-going MINERvA experiment at Fermilab.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Review of uncertainties in the cosmic supernova relic neutrino background

We review the computation of and associated uncertainties in the current understanding of the relic neutrino background due to core-collapse supernovae, black hole formation and neutron star merger events. We consider the current status of uncertainties due to the nuclear equation of state (EoS), the progenitor masses, the source supernova neutrino spectrum, the cosmological star formation rate, the stellar initial mass function, neutrino oscillations, and neutrino self-interactions. We summarize the current viability of future neutrino detectors to distinguish the nuclear EoS and the temperature of supernova neutrinos via the detected relic supernova neutrino spectrum.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2013

Sensitivity to electronvolt-scale sterile neutrinos at a 3.8-GeV/c muon decay ring

The liquid-scintillator neutrino-detector (LSND) and mini booster neutrino experiment (MiniBooNE) experiments claim to observe the oscillation $\bar{v}$ μ → $\bar{v}$ e , which can only be explained by additional neutrinos and is a claim that must be further tested. This thesis proposes a new accelerator and experiment called neutrinos from stored muons ( STORM) to refute or confirm the oscillation these claims by studying the CPT-equivalent channel v e → v μ . A 3.8-GeV/c muon decay ring is proposed with neutrino detectors placed 20 m and 2000 m from the decay ring. The detector technology would be a magnetized iron sampling calorimeter, where the magnetic field is induced by a superconducting transmission line. In a frequentist study, the sensitivity of this experiment after 5 years would be >10σ . The range of the thesis discussion starts with the proton front-end design and ends with neutrino parameter estimation. After describing the phenomenology of sterile neutrinos, the facility and detector performance work is presented. Finally, the systematics are explained before the sensitivity and parameter-estimation works are explained

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Characterization of Final State Interaction Strength in Plastic Scintillator by Muon-Neutrino Charged Current Charged Pion Production

Precise knowledge of neutrino-nucleus interactions is increasingly important as neutrino oscillation measurements transition into the systematics-limited era. In addition to modifying the initial interaction, the nuclear medium can scatter and absorb the interaction by-products through final state interactions, changing the types and kinematic distributions of particles seen by the detector. Recent neutrino pion production data from MiniBooNE is inconsistent with the final state interaction strength predicted by models and theoretical calculations, and some models fit best to the MiniBooNE data only after removing final state interactions entirely. This thesis presents a measurement of dσ/dT π and dσ/dθ π for muon-neutrino charged current charged pion production in the MINER A scintillator tracker. MINER A is a neutrino-nucleus scattering experiment installed in the few-GeV NuMI beam line at Fermilab. The analysis is limited to neutrino energies between 1.5-10 GeV. Dependence on invariant hadronic mass W is studied through two versions of the analysis that impose the limits W < 1.4 GeV and W < 1.8 GeV. The lower limit on W increases compatibility with the MiniBooNE pion data. The shapes of the differential cross sections, which depend strongly on the nature of final state interactions, are compared to Monte Carlo and theoretical predictions. It is shown that the measurements presented in this thesis favor models that contain final state interactions. Additionally, a variety of neutrino-nucleus interaction models are shown to successfully reproduce the thesis measurements, while simultaneously failing to describe the shape of the MiniBooNE data.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Neutrino Oscillation Parameter Sensitivity in Future Long-Baseline Experiments

The study of neutrino interactions and propagation has produced evidence for physics beyond the standard model and promises to continue to shed light on rare phenomena. Since the discovery of neutrino oscillations in the late 1990s there have been rapid advances in establishing the three flavor paradigm of neutrino oscillations. The 2012 discovery of a large value for the last unmeasured missing angle has opened the way for future experiments to search for charge-parity symmetry violation in the lepton sector. This thesis presents an analysis of the future sensitivity to neutrino oscillations in the three flavor paradigm for the T2K, NO A, LBNE, and T2HK experiments. The theory of the three flavor paradigm is explained and the methods to use these theoretical predictions to design long baseline neutrino experiments are described. The sensitivity to the oscillation parameters for each experiment is presented with a particular focus on the search for CP violation and the measurement of the neutrino mass hierarchy. The variations of these sensitivities with statistical considerations and experimental design optimizations taken into account are explored. The effects of systematic uncertainties in the neutrino flux, interaction, and detection predictions are also considered by incorporating more advanced simulations inputs from the LBNE experiment.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2013

Exclusive Muon-Neutrino Charged Current Muon Plus Any Number of Protons Topologies In ArgoNeuT

Neutrinos remain among the least understood fundamental particles even after decades of study. As we enter the precision era o f neutrino measurements bigger and more sophisticated detectors have emerged. The leading candidate among them is a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC ) detector technology due to its bubble-like chamber imaging, superb background rejection and scalability. I t is a perfect candidate that w ill aim to answer the remaining questions of the nature o f neutrino and perhaps our existence. Studying neutrinos with a detector that employs detection via beautiful images o f neutrino interactions can be both illuminating and surprising. The analysis presented here takes the full advantage of the LArTPC power by exploiting the first topological analysis of charged current muon neutrino p + N p , muon and any number of protons, interactions with the ArgoNeuT LArTPC experiment on an argon target. The results presented here are the first that address the proton multiplicity at the vertex and the proton kinematics. This study also addresses the importance o f nuclear effects in neutrino interactions. Furthermore, the developed here reconstruction techniques present a significant step forward for this technology and can be employed in the future LArTPC detectors.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗