Neutrino news
Experiments, results and recently published work from across the field.
In summary. This week's neutrino news is dominated by detector engineering and machine-learning efforts at DUNE, continued operations and event-identification work at IceCube, and a new precision cross-section measurement from NOvA. On the theory side, published papers this week addressed the reach of neutrinoless double-beta decay searches, event-generator benchmarking for argon-based detectors, and decoherence and decay phenomenology at long-baseline experiments. This paragraph summarises the items below; the sources are on the items themselves.
DUNE researchers are developing AI systems to sort through the large volumes of data the experiment will produce, aiming to identify neutrino interactions, spot signs of a stellar explosion, and detect problems inside the detector. The effort draws on decades of machine-learning work at Fermilab.
A prototype DUNE detector was subjected to an extreme 300,000-volt stress trial as part of testing before installation deep underground in the United States.
IceCube is using atmospheric neutrinos, produced in cosmic-ray-induced air showers, to probe the interior structure of the Earth, complementing indirect methods such as seismic and gravitational measurements.
IceCube has described WavePID, a tool that identifies neutrino events from the shape of the light pattern produced when a neutrino interacts with the ice, working at the nanosecond level.
Using the near detector in the NuMI beam with a 1.2×10^21 proton-on-target exposure, the NOvA collaboration measured the muon antineutrino charged-current quasi-elastic cross section on hydrogen, selecting 35,509 signal events — the highest-statistics sample of (anti)neutrino-hydrogen interactions measured to date. Backgrounds from interactions on heavier nuclei were constrained using dedicated data control samples to reduce systematic uncertainties.
recently published, with the links each record carries
A Nature Astronomy article describes TAMBO, a proposed mountain-based observatory designed to detect high-energy neutrinos, aiming to help map a high-energy neutrino sky that remains poorly charted and to search for clues of new physics along the way.
Measuring the high-energy neutrino sky using the deep-valley neutrino observatory TAMBO — INSPIRE · DOICombining likelihood functions from a suite of neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments with nuclear matrix elements computed ab initio in the in-medium similarity renormalization group approach, this paper derives global Bayesian limits on the Majorana neutrino mass. Unlike more conventional nuclear models, the ab initio results indicate that the current generation of 0νββ experiments has likely not yet reached the sensitivity needed to probe the relevant mass range.
Global ab initio neutrino mass limits from neutrinoless double-beta decay — arXiv · INSPIRE · DOIThis paper uses the GENIE event generator to test several pionless charged-current interaction models — including different nucleon form factors, quasielastic cross-section calculations, and nuclear ground-state treatments — against recent MicroBooNE measurements on argon. It reports strong separation between competing models in some cases, giving upcoming neutrino experiments clearer grounds for choosing among simulation options.
Benchmarking state-of-the-art theory and empirical models of pionless neutrino-argon … — arXiv · INSPIRE · DOIThis study examines how well combined NOvA and DUNE data could constrain an invisible decay of ν3 into a sterile state under the normal mass hierarchy. It finds that the true value of θ23 significantly affects the achievable constraint on the decay parameter, with a higher-octant value improving the bound.
Constraining invisible neutrino decay at NOνA and DUNE — INSPIRE · DOIThis paper compares two formalisms for introducing quantum decoherence into neutrino oscillations — one defined directly in the matter mass-eigenstate basis, the other defined in vacuum and rotated into the matter basis — and shows the two give different oscillation probabilities and sensitivities at the future DUNE and P2SO long-baseline experiments.
Impact of different neutrino decoherence formalisms at the future long-baseline … — arXiv · INSPIRE · DOI