Neutrino Probes of Long-Range Interactions

Searches for new fundamental interactions tend to concentrate on subatomic scales. Some theories, however, predict new interactions that—like gravity—can involve large numbers of particles acting over astronomical distances. A study by Mauricio Bustamante of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark and Sanjib Kumar Agarwalla of the Institute of Physics in Bhubaneswar, India, analyzes data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. The researchers looked for changes in neutrino oscillation behavior caused by long-range interactions with, for example, the 1057 electrons in the Sun or the 1067 electrons distributed throughout our Galaxy. The researchers find no such signatures, which allows them to place new constraints on these types of interactions.