Papers › Magnetic Moments of Astrophysical Neutrinos
Magnetic Moments of Astrophysical Neutrinos
Joachim Kopp, Toby Opferkuch, Edward Wang
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
We study the impact of neutrino magnetic moments on astrophysical neutrinos, in particular supernova neutrinos and ultra-high energy neutrinos from extragalactic sources. We show that magnetic moment-induced conversion of left-handed neutrinos into unobservable right-handed singlet states can substantially change the flux and flavour composition of these neutrinos at Earth. Notably, neutrinos from a supernova's neutronisation burst, whose flux can be predicted with O(10%) accuracy, offer a discovery reach to neutrino magnetic moments ∼few ×10⁻¹³ μ_B, up to one order of magnitude below current limits. For high-energy neutrinos from distant sources, for which no robust flux prediction exists, we show how the flavour composition at Earth can be used as a handle to establish the presence of non-negligible magnetic moments, potentially down to few ×10⁻¹⁷ μ_B if the measurement can be performed on neutrinos from a single source. In both cases, the sensitivity strongly depends on the galactic resp. intergalactic magnetic field profiles along the line of sight. Therefore, while a discovery is possible down to very small values of the magnetic moment, the absence of a discovery does not imply an equally strong limit. We also comment on the dependence of our results on the right-handed neutrino mass, paying special attention to the transition from coherent deflection by a classical magnetic field to incoherent scattering on individual scattering targets. Finally, we show that a measurement of Standard Model Dirac neutrino magnetic moments, of order 10⁻¹⁹ μ_B, could be possible under rather optimistic, but not completely outrageous, assumptions using flavour ratios of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections