Direct Experimental Constraints on the Spatial Extent of a Neutrino Wavepacket

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03102v3
• Date: Wed, 1 May 2024 01:31:58 GMT
• Title: Direct Experimental Constraints on the Spatial Extent of a Neutrino Wavepacket
• Authors: Joseph Smolsky, Kyle G Leach, Ryan Abells, Pedro Amaro, Adrien Andoche, Keith Borbridge, Connor Bray, Robin Cantor, David Diercks, Spencer Fretwell, Stephan Friedrich, Abigail Gillespie, Mauro Guerra, Ad Hall, Cameron N Harris, Jackson T Harris, Calvin Hinkle, Amii Lamm, Leendert M Hayen, Paul-Antoine Hervieux, Geon-Bo Kim, Inwook Kim, Annika Lennarz, Vincenzo Lordi, Jorge Machado, Andrew Marino, David McKeen, Xavier Mougeot, Francisco Ponce, Chris Ruiz, Amit Samanta, José Paulo Santos, Caitlyn Stone-Whitehead, John Taylor, Joseph Templet, Sriteja Upadhyayula, Louis Wagner, William K Warburton,
• Abstract summary: neutrinos are the least understood fundamental particles of nature. quantum properties of neutrinos emitted in experimentally relevant sources are virtually unknown. Lower limit on the spatial uncertainty of the recoil daughter was found to be $sigma_textrmN, x geq 6.2$,pm.
• Score: 0.4303687694525454
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Despite their high relative abundance in our Universe, neutrinos are the least understood fundamental particles of nature. They also provide a unique system to study quantum coherence and the wavelike nature of particles in fundamental systems due to their extremely weak interaction probabilities. In fact, the quantum properties of neutrinos emitted in experimentally relevant sources are virtually unknown and the spatial extent of the neutrino wavepacket is only loosely constrained by reactor neutrino oscillation data with a spread of 13 orders of magnitude. Here, we present the first direct limits of this quantity through a new experimental concept to extract the energy width, $\sigma_{\textrm{N},E}$, of the recoil daughter nucleus emitted in the nuclear electron capture (EC) decay of $^7$Be. The final state in the EC decay process contains a recoiling $^7$Li nucleus and an electron neutrino ($\nu_e$) which are entangled at their creation. The $^7$Li energy spectrum is measured to high precision by directly embedding $^7$Be radioisotopes into a high resolution superconducting tunnel junction that is operated as a cryogenic sensor. The lower limit on the spatial uncertainty of the recoil daughter was found to be $\sigma_{\textrm{N}, x} \geq 6.2$\,pm, which implies the final-state system is localized at a scale more than a thousand times larger than the nucleus itself. From this measurement, the first direct lower limits on the spatial extent of the neutrino wavepacket were extracted using two different theoretical methods. These results have wide-reaching implications in several areas including the nature of spatial localization at sub-atomic scales, interpretation of neutrino physics data, and the potential reach of future large-scale experiments.

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