NuBridge · Neutrino experiments and data as a bridge to new physics

Neutrino experiments and data as a bridge to new physics

The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory that incorporates our current knowledge about the nature of fundamental particles and their interactions. Despite being an incredibly successfully predictive framework, the Standard Model appears to be incomplete, as several observations cannot be addressed within it (massive nature of neutrinos, existence of dark matter and matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe). This motivates the search for New Physics beyond the Standard Model. In the past, this search has mostly focused on exploring the high-energy frontier, by looking for new particles that can be produced in the interaction of Standard Model particles at increasingly high values of energy (this is carried out at collider facilities such as the LHC). This activity provided decisive confirmation tests of the validity of the Standard Model, but currently no hints for the nature of the beyond the Standard Model physics. The aim of NuBridge is to explore the possibility that instead the New Physics particles lie at a lower energy scale, but have very feeble couplings with the Standard Model ones, effectively forming a "Dark Sector". The test of this hypothesis requires a different kind of experiments, where a very large number of interactions is generated in fixed-target experiments, thus exploring the high-intensity frontier. NuBridge employs neutrinos as a possible bridge between the Standard Model and New Physics, following three main research axes. First, it plans to use data from the current and next generation neutrino experiments to test the dark sector hypothesis; neutrino experiments can provide powerful beams of primary particles, and large and sensitive detectors, making them ideal sets to look for feebly interacting particles. Second, it looks for possible indirect manifestations of New Physics in precision neutrino data, by performing global fits of experimental data and looking for deviations with respect to the Standard Model framework. Third, it provides public and open-source tools that can be used by third-party researchers to study the dark sector and neutrino physics, to enhance the impact of the project and keep providing additional research results beyond its end-date.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union