Description:

Ultra-light dark matter (ULDM) composed of bosons lighter than 1eV is expected to behave as a macroscopic classical field oscillating in time at its Compton frequency. If the ULDM field couples to neutrinos, it would introduce temporal variations to neutrino masses and mixing, which could be detected in neutrino oscillations experiments. In particular, we show that the neutrino oscillation probability might be significantly altered by a parametric resonance. This resonance can occur if the typical frequency of neutrino flavor-oscillations, determined by the mass-squared difference of the neutrinos and the neutrino energy, matches the oscillation frequency of the ULDM field, determined by its mass. The resonance could lead to observable effects even if the ULDM coupling is very small, and even if its typical oscillation period is much shorter than the experimental temporal resolution. An outlier in the data collected by the KamLAND experiment can be explained by such narrow ULDM-induced parametric resonance, without affecting the measurements of other current neutrino oscillation experiments. This scenario will be tested by the future JUNO experiment.

Yogev Shpilman, PhD Student, Weizmann Institute of Science

Host: Andre de Gouvea