A short overview of neutrino electromagnetic properties with focus on existed experimental constraints and future prospects is presented. The related new effect in neutrino flavour and spin-flavour oscillations in the transversal matter currents is introduced.
The electromagnetic properties of neutrinos have attracted considerable attention from researchers for many decades (see [1] for a review). However, until recently, there was no indication in favour of nonzero electromagnetic properties of neutrinos either from laboratory experiments with ground-based neutrino sources or from observations of astrophysical neutrino fluxes. The situation changed after the XENON collaboration reported [2] results of the search for new physics with low-energy electronic recoil data recorded with the XENON1T detector. The results show an excess of events over the known backgrounds in the recoil energy which, as one of the possible explanations, admit the presence of a sizable neutrino magnetic moment, the value of which is of the order of the existing laboratory limitations. In these short notes we give a brief introduction to neutrino electromagnetic properties and focus on the most important constraints on neutrino magnetic moments, charge radii and millicharges from the terrestrial experiments and astrophysical considerations. The promising new possibilities for constraining neutrino electromagnetic properties in future experiments are also discussed.
The recent IceCube publication claims the observation of cosmic neutrinos with energies down to $sim 10$ TeV, reinforcing the growing evidence that the neutrino flux in the 10-100 TeV range is unexpectedly large. Any conceivable source of these neutrinos must also produce a $gamma$-ray flux which degrades in energy en route to the Earth and contributes to the extragalactic $gamma$-ray background measured by the Fermi satellite. In a quantitative multimessenger analysis, featuring minimalistic assumptions, we find a $geq 3sigma$ tension in the data, reaching $sim 5sigma$ for cosmic neutrinos extended down to $sim 1$ TeV, interpreted as evidence for a population of hidden cosmic-ray accelerators.
Observations of high energy neutrinos, both in the laboratory and from cosmic sources, can be a useful probe in searching for new physics. Such observations can provide sensitive tests of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV), which may be a the result of quantum gravity physics (QG). We review some observationally testable consequences of LIV using effective field theory (EFT) formalism. To do this, one can postulate the existence of additional small LIV terms in free particle Lagrangians, suppressed by powers of the Planck mass. The observational consequences of such terms are then examined. In particular, one can place limits on a class of non-renormalizable, mass dimension five and six Lorentz invariance violating operators that may be the result of QG.
Flavor ratios of very high energy astrophysical neutrinos, which can be studied at the Earth by a neutrino telescope such as IceCube, can serve to diagnose their production mechanism at the astrophysical source. The flavor ratios for neutrinos and antineutrinos can be quite different as we do not know how they are produced in the astrophysical environment. Due to this uncertainty the neutrino and antineutrino flavor ratios at the Earth also could be quite different. Nonetheless, it is generally assumed that flavor ratios for neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same at the Earth, in fitting the high energy astrophysical neutrino data. This is a reasonable assumption for the limited statistics for the data we currently have. However, in the future the fit must be performed allowing for a possible discrepancy in these two fractions in order to be able to disentangle different production mechanisms at the source from new physics in the neutrino sector. To reinforce this issue, in this work we show that a wrong assumption about the distribution of neutrino flavor ratios at the Earth may indeed lead to misleading interpretations of IceCube results.
In the present work we propose to study neutrino oscillations employing sources of monoenergetic neutrinos following electron capture by the nucleus. Since the neutrino energy is very low the smaller of the two oscillation lengths, L23, appearing in this electronic neutrino disappearance experiment can be so small that the full oscillation can take place inside the detector and one may determine very accurately the neutrino oscillation parameters. Since in this case the oscillation probability is proportional to theta13, one can measure or set a better limit on the unknown parameter theta13. This is quite important, since, if this mixing angle vanishes, there is not going to be CP violation in the leptonic sector. The best way to detect it is by measuring electron recoils in neutrino-electron scattering. One, however, has to pay the price that the expected counting rates are very small. Thus one needs a very intensive neutrino source and a large detector with as low as possible energy threshold and high energy and position resolution. Both spherical gaseous and cylindrical liquid detectors are studied. Different source candidates are considered.