The Neutrino Chord: How a Supernova Will Unveil the Hidden Mass Order ✦

Original: "Neutrino mass ordering from the next Galactic supernova at DUNE, HK, and JUNO"

· Prantik Sarmah, Sovan Chakraborty, Abinash Medhi, Debanjan Bose, Moon Moon Devi

arXiv:2606.06580v1 · 2026-06-04 · CC BY 4.0 · ⏱ 1 min · HEP Phenomenology High Energy

A neutrino shower from the next massive star explosion in the Milky Way will finally reveal how the masses of the three neutrino types are arranged—normal or inverted.

Links in the knowledge graph 1

One explosion in our Galaxy—and Earth is bathed in a neutrino shower of 10⁵⁸ particles. Almost all will zip through untouched, but the rare strikes upon detectors will bring an answer to the question that has vexed physicists for decades: in what order do the masses of the three neutrino types stand? Like three strings of different tension, they will respond to the cataclysm each in their own way—a peak in one tonality or a smooth rise in another. This cosmic tuning fork may already be on its way to us, and when it sounds, we will finally hear the true arrangement of the fundamental particles.

🎯 In the first 20–30 milliseconds of the neutronization peak, the DUNE detector will register as many neutrinos as it captures from a whole year of observing the Sun. And the total energy carried away by all neutrinos over a few seconds exceeds the optical luminosity of the entire Milky Way over the same period by a factor of a hundred.

F_{\bar{\nu}_e}^{\text{NO}} = \cos^2\theta_{12} F^0_{\bar{\nu}_e} + \sin^2\theta_{12} F^0_{\nu_x}

The post-oscillation flux is a mixture of the original electron antineutrino flux and the heavy-lepton neutrino flux, weighted by the squared cosine and sine of the mixing angle θ12. It is the ratio of these components that makes the rise rate sensitive to the hierarchy type.

I am the author

The Neutrino Chord: How a Supernova Will Unveil the Hidden Mass Order ✦