Towards the detection of ultra-low energetic neutrinos with plasma metamaterials

Abstract

Experiments as IceCube or Super-Kamiokande have been successful in detecting highly energetic neutrinos in the. Neutrinos in the ultra-low energy range ($\mathcal{E}<1.0~\rm{eV}$) have been theoretically predicted but their observation remain elusive, and no concrete experimental scheme has been proposed for that job. Here, we propose a novel scheme based on graphene plasmonic metamaterials to designed to detect ultra-low energetic neutrinos. We claim that slow neutrino fluxes, interacting with solid-state plasmas, can generate an instability due to the weak neutrino-plasmon interaction, which is reminiscent of the beam-plasma instability taking place in astrophysics and laboratory plasmas. We make use of the semi-classical limit of the weak interaction to describe the coupling between the neutrinos and electrons in graphene. To render the scheme practical, we investigate the neutrino-plasma instability produced in a graphene metamaterial, composed by a periodic stacking of graphene layers. Our findings reveal that the controlled excitation of plasma waves in such graphene metamaterial allows for the detection of neutrinos in the energy range $\sim 1.0~\rm{\mu eV}-100~\rm{meV}$, and fluxes in the range $10^{4}-10^{10} \rm{cm^{-2} s^{-1}}$.