Enhanced neutrino polarizability

Abstract

We point out that neutrinos can have enhanced couplings to photons, if light (pseudo)scalar mediators are present, resulting in potentially measurable neutrino polarizability. We show that the expected suppression from small neutrino masses can be compensated by the light mediator mass, generating dimension 7 Rayleigh operators at low scales. We explore the rich phenomenology of such models, computing in details the constraints on the viable parameter space, spanned by the couplings of the mediator to neutrinos and photons. Finally, we build several explicit models that lead to enhanced neutrino polarizability by modifying the inverse see-saw majoron, i.e., the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson of the $U(1{)}_L$ global lepton number responsible for generating small neutrino masses.

48 pages, 9 figures. v2: Improved star cooling discussion. Corrected bound from Xenon-nT. Added recast of monophoton searches discussion and EFT bound. Submitted to JHEP

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Limits on ALP-neutrino couplings from loop-level processes
• A 17 MeV pseudoscalar and the LSND, MiniBooNE and ATOMKI anomalies
• Correlating neutrino magnetic moment and scalar triplet dark matter to enlighten XENONnT bounds in a Type-II model
• Long-Lived HNLs via ALP Portal at the LHC
• Enhanced active-sterile neutrino polarizability at the intensity frontier