Cosmic background neutrinos (CνB) helicity composition is different for Dirac or Majorana neutrinos making detectors based on CνB capture sensitive to the nature of neutrinos. We calculate, for the first time, the helicity changes of neutrinos crossing dark matter fields, to quantitatively calculate this effect on the capture rate. We show that a fraction of neutrinos change their helicity, regardless of them being deflected by a void or a dark matter halo. The average signal from the 100 most massive voids or halos in a Gpc3 gives a prediction that if neutrinos are Dirac, the density of the CνB background measured on Earth should be 48 cm-3 for left-helical neutrinos, a decrease of 15% (53.6 cm-3; 5%) for a halo (void) with respect to the standard calculation without including gravitational effects due to large scale structures. In terms of the total capture rate in a 100 g tritium detector, this translates in 4.9+1.1
-0.8 neutrinos per year for the Dirac case, as a function of the unknown neutrino mass scale, or 8.1 per year if neutrinos are Majorana. Thus although smaller than the factor two for the non-relativistic case, it is still large enough to be detected and it highlights the power of future CνB detectors, as an alternative to neutrinoless double beta decay experiments, to discover the neutrino nature.
The local supercluster acts as a gravity deflection source for cosmic background neutrinos. This deflection by gravity changes the neutrino helicity and therefore has important consequences for ground based tritium capture experiments aimed at determining if the neutrino is Dirac or Majorana. Here we explore the deflection effect of the local supercluster using the higher resolution DEMNUni simulation suite and reaffirm our previous results. We show that the lightest neutrinos are ultra-relativistic enough to suffer little deflection by gravity and at the same time not relativistic enough to achieve the same capture rate for Dirac and Majorana cases. This means that the capture rate in Ptolemy-like experiments will be sensitive to the neutrino nature and that gravity deflection enlarges the difference between Majorana and Dirac rates. Moreover, using the relation between mass and momentum of the neutrinos frozen Fermi-Dirac distribution, we are able to calculate the deflection angle for different neutrino masses from the same set of neutrinos obtained from the simulation. Doing so, we provide a formula to compute the deflection angle for any neutrino mass, such that when cosmology detects an absolute neutrino mass, precise predictions can be made for tritium ground-based detectors on Earth aimed to determine neutrinos nature.
We propose a novel experiment, the Canfranc Axion Detection Experiment (CADEx), to probe dark matter axions with masses in the range 330-460 µeV, within the W-band (80-110 GHz), an unexplored parameter space in the well-motivated dark matter window of Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD) axions. The experimental design consists of a microwave resonant cavity haloscope in a high static magnetic field coupled to a highly sensitive detecting system based on Kinetic Inductance Detectors via optimized quasi-optics (horns and mirrors). The experiment is in preparation and will be installed in the dilution refrigerator of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory. Sensitivity forecasts for axion detection with CADEx, together with the potential of the experiment to search for dark photons, are presented.
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