Beyond tree level with solar neutrinos: Towards measuring the flavor composition and CP violation

Abstract

After being produced as electron neutrinos (νe), solar neutrinos partially change their flavor to νμ and ντ en route to Earth. Although the flavor ratio of the νe flux to the total flux has been well measured, the νμ:ντ composition has not yet been experimentally probed. In this work we investigate the potential of the next-generation experiments for measuring the νμ:ντ flavor ratio by utilizing flavor-dependent radiative corrections in the cross sections for νμ and ντ scattering. Since the transition probabilities of νe to νμ and ντ depend on the leptonic CP phase, we also investigate the sensitivity to the CP phase and show that a statistical significance of ∼1σ could be reached through precision measurements of solar neutrino spectra.