Efficiently Extracting Energy from Cosmological Neutrinos

Understand

Detecting the extremely low-energy neutrinos that form the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) presents many experimental challenges, but pursuing this elusive goal is still worthwhile because these weakly-interacting particles could provide a new window into the structure and composition of the early universe.

• This report examines whether cosmological neutrinos can deposit sufficient energy into a target system to be detectable with plausible extensions of current bolometric technologies.
• While the macroscopic wavelengths of cosmological neutrinos can greatly enhance their cross sections with dense targets, such interactions can only be detectable if they transfer a significant fraction of each neutrino's kinetic energy into the detector system.
• We find that a large array of dense target masses coupled to suitable motion-sensitive circuits could potentially satisfy both of these conditions and thus might be able to serve as the basis for a more practical cosmological neutrino detector.