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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Testing the fifth force on lepton spins through neutrino oscillations

Rundong Fang1,*, Ji-Heng Guo1,*, Jia Liu2,3,†, and Xiao-Ping Wang1,4,‡

  • 1School of Physics, Beihang University, Beijing 100083, China
  • 2School of Physics and State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 3Center for High Energy Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 4Beijing Key Laboratory of Advanced Nuclear Materials and Physics, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: jialiu@pku.edu.cn
  • ‡Contact author: hcwangxiaoping@buaa.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 112, L051701 – Published 3 September, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/r9p5-fxzb

Abstract

We investigate a fifth force mediated by a light vector boson that couples to lepton spins, characterized by axial-vector couplings to leptons and vector couplings to nucleons. This interaction generates a potential proportional to the inner product of the lepton spin vector and the nucleon-lepton relative velocity vector, a feature extensively explored with precision spin sensors. Employing weak symmetry, we show that left-handed charged lepton couplings naturally extend to left-handed neutrinos, enabling this fifth force to influence neutrino oscillations. For electron-nucleon couplings, we find that solar and reactor neutrino experiments provide comparable constraints to those from spin sensors and surpass them in the short-range fifth force region. For muon-nucleon couplings, neutrino oscillation experiments exclude the fifth force as a viable explanation for the muon g−2 anomaly in the context of a vector mediator, tightening the bounds by 2 orders of magnitude in coupling strength by solar and atmospheric neutrino data. Our results highlight the critical role of neutrino oscillations in probing fifth forces acting across all three generations of lepton spins.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, L051701– Published 3 September, 2025
  • Received 22 November 2024
  • Accepted 19 August 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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