Grand Challenges in Nuclear Physics: A Long and Exciting Way to Go

Marcucci, L. E.

doi:10.3389/fphy.2018.00078

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…In fact, being based on the detection of neutrinos captured by tritium nuclei, a process with no energy threshold, PTOLEMY has a vast physics case, able to detect very low energy fluxes, and to provide constraints on neutrino properties, those of standard ones as well as of exotic sterile species. Furthermore, it was also realized that the PTOLEMY setup (but without tritium) could be a way to observe dark matter particles with masses in the MeV mass range, keeping track of their arrival directions [103,104], while the complete detector setup (with tritium) can also serve as a "laboratory" to test "ab-initio" theoretical predictions of few-nucleon systems, and therefore ultimately of the models for nuclear interactions and weak currents [105].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neutrino physics with the PTOLEMY project: active neutrino properties and the light sterile case

Betti

Biasotti

Boscá

et al. 2019

J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys.

155

177

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The PTOLEMY project aims to develop a scalable design for a Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) detector, the first of its kind and the only one conceived that can look directly at the image of the Universe encoded in neutrino background produced in the first second after the Big Bang. The scope of the work for the next three years is to complete the conceptual design of this detector and to validate with direct measurements that the nonneutrino backgrounds are below the expected cosmological signal. In this paper we discuss in details the theoretical aspects of the experiment and its physics goals. In particular, we mainly address three issues. First we discuss the sensitivity of PTOLEMY to the standard neutrino mass scale. We then study the perspectives of the experiment to detect the CNB via neutrino capture on tritium as a function of the neutrino mass scale and the energy resolution of the apparatus. Finally, we consider an extra sterile neutrino with mass in the eV range, coupled to the active states via oscillations, which has been advocated in view of neutrino oscillation anomalies. This extra state would contribute to the tritium decay spectrum, and its properties, mass and mixing angle, could be studied by analyzing the features in the beta decay electron spectrum.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%