Recoilless Resonant Emission and Detection of Electron Antineutrinos

Abstract

Recoilless resonant capture of monoenergetic electron antineutrinos (Moessbauer antineutrinos) emitted in bound-state beta-decay in the system 3H - 3He is discussed. The recoilfree fraction including a possible phonon excitation due to local lattice expansion and contraction at the time of the nuclear transition, homogeneous and inhomogeneous line broadening, and the relativistic second-order Doppler effect are considered. It is demonstrated that homogeneous line broadening is essential due to stochastic magnetic relaxation processes in a metallic lattice. Inhomogeneous line broadening plays an equally important role. An essential issue which has been overlooked up to now, is an energy shift of the resonance line due to the direct influence of the binding energies of the 3H and 3He atoms in the lattice on the energy of the electron antineutrinos. This energy shift as well as the second-order Doppler shift exhibit variations in a non-perfect (inhomogeneous) lattice and may seriously jeopardize the observation of Moessbauer antineutrinos. If successful in spite of these enormous difficulties, Moessbauer antineutrino experiments could be used to gain new and deep insights into the nature of neutrino oscillations, determine the neutrino mass hierarchy as well as up to now unknown oscillation parameters, search for sterile neutrinos, and measure the gravitational redshift of electron antineutrinos in the field of the Earth.

arXiv commentTo appear in Journal of Physics: Conference Series; Proceedings of Neutrino 2008, Christchurch, New Zealand

References in corpus (3)

• Time-Energy Uncertainty Relations for Neutrino Oscillation and MÖssbauer Neutrino Experiment
• Recoilless resonant neutrino capture and basics of neutrino oscillations
• On Neutrino Oscillations and Time-Energy Uncertainty Relation

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• Properties of CP Violation in Neutrino-Antineutrino Oscillations
• Mossbauer neutrinos in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory
• Comment on "Hypersharp Resonant Capture of Neutrinos as a Laboratory Probe of the Planck Length"
• Testing Nonstandard Neutrino Properties with a Mössbauer Oscillation Experiment
• Mössbauer Antineutrinos: Recoilless Resonant Emission and Absorption of Electron Antineutrinos
• CP Violation in Predictive Neutrino Mass Structures