Introduction to Neutrino Sources

There are many neutrino sources in the Universe, either astrophysical or terrestrial, observed in many different processes. The first Grand Unified Neutrino Spectrum (neutrino flux versus neutrino energy, such named recently in [Vit19]) appeared first in 1995 in the book “La lumière des neutrinos” (in French)  [Cri95]. It has been reproduced in several proceedings of conferences (see for example [Spi99]). It has been quoted by W. Haxton et al. who calculated the thermal flux of low-energy solar neutrinos [Hax00].

The spectrum of neutrinos (and antineutrinos) at Earth spans over 28 decades in energy and 30 decades in flux when considering the different sources. Orange is for cosmological neutrinos, green for solar neutrinos, brown for geoneutrinos, violet for reactor (anti)neutrinos, black for supernova neutrinos (dotted for SN1987A burst-like, full for diffuse background), blue for atmospheric neutrinos, red for very high energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources). A slightly updated version has been used by C. Spiering [Spi12].

In [Vit19] G. Raffelt and collaborators revisited in great detail the different components in the light of the new discoveries and published this new version of the Grand Unified Neutrino Spectrum, much more precise quantitatively. CNB is for cosmic neutrino background, BBN for big bang nucleosynthesis, DSNB for diffuse supernova neutrino background, cosmogenic for neutrinos coming from the interaction of ultra high-energy cosmic-rays with the cosmic microwave background CMB.

References

	Author(s)	Title	Reference
Cri95	Michel Cribier, Michel Spiro, Daniel Vignaud	La lumière des neutrinos	Seuil (1995)
Hax00	W.C. Haxton and W. Lin	The very low energy solar flux of electrons and heavy-flavor neutrinos and antineutrinos	Phys. Lett. B486 (2000) 263 ; arXiv:nucl-th/0006055
Spi12	Christian Spiering	Towards High Energy Neutrino Astronomy – A Historical Review	European Physical Journal H 37 (2012) 515; arXiv:1207.4952
Spi99	M. Spiro, D. Vignaud	Neutrino physics and astrophysics	Nucl. Phys. A654 (1999) 350c
Vit19	E. Vitagliano, I. Tamborra, G. Raffelt	Grand unified neutrino spectrum at Earth	Rev. Mod. Phys. 92 (2020) 45006; arXiv:1910.11878