Cosmic background neutrinos deflected by gravity: DEMNUni simulation analysis

Abstract

Abstract The local supercluster acts as a gravity deflection source for cosmic background neutrinos. This deflection by gravity changes the neutrino helicity and therefore has important consequences for ground based tritium capture experiments aimed at determining if the neutrino is Dirac or Majorana. Here we explore the deflection effect of the local supercluster using two simulations from the DEMNUni suite characterised by very different mass resolutions, as they are both filled with 20483 dark matter particles (and an equal number of massive neutrino particles) but have comoving volumes of (2 h -1Gpc)3 and (500 h -1Mpc)3, respectively. We reaffirm our previous results and show that the lightest neutrinos are ultra-relativistic enough to suffer little deflection by gravity and at the same time not relativistic enough to achieve the same capture rate for Dirac and Majorana cases. This means that the capture rate in Ptolemy-like experiments will be sensitive to the neutrino nature and that gravity deflection enlarges the difference between Majorana and Dirac rates. Moreover, using the relation between mass and momentum of the neutrinos frozen Fermi-Dirac distribution, but taking into consideration gravity corrections, we are able to calculate the deflection angle for different neutrino masses from the same set of neutrinos obtained from the simulation. Doing so, we provide a formula to compute the deflection angle for any neutrino mass, such that when cosmology detects an absolute neutrino mass, precise predictions can be made for tritium ground-based detectors on Earth aimed to determine neutrinos nature.