The neutrino charge radius as a physical observable

Abstract We present a method which allows, at least in principle, the direct extraction of the gauge-invariant and process-independent neutrino charge radius (NCR) from experiments. Under special kinematic conditions, the judicious combination of neutrino and anti-neutrino forward differential cross-sections allows the exclusion of all target-dependent contributions, such as gauge-independent box-graphs, not related to the NCR. We show that the remaining contributions contain universal, renormalization group invariant combinations, such as the electroweak effective charge and the running mixing angle, which must be also separated out. By considering the appropriate number of independent experiments we show that one may systematically eliminate these universal terms, and finally express the NCR entirely in terms of physical cross-sections. Even though the kinematic conditions and the required precision may render the proposed experiments unfeasible, at the conceptual level the analysis presented here allows for the promotion of the NCR into a genuine physical observable.