Abstract: We construct a neutrino model of three twin neutrinos in light of the neutrino appearance excesses at LSND and MiniBooNE. The model, which includes a twin parity, naturally predicts identical lepton Yukawa structures in the Standard Model and the twin sectors. As a result, a universal mixing angle controls all three twin neutrino couplings to the Standard Model charged leptons. This mixing angle is predicted to be the ratio of the electroweak scale over the composite scale of the Higgs boson and has the right order of magnitude to fit the data. The heavy twin neutrinos decay within the experimental lengths into active neutrinos plus a long-lived Majoron and can provide a good fit, at around the 4 sigma confidence level, to the LSND and MiniBooNE appearance data while simultaneously satisfying the disappearance constraints. For the Majorana neutrino case, the fact that neutrinos have a larger scattering cross section than antineutrinos provides a natural explanation to MiniBooNE's observation of a larger antineutrino appearance excess.

Abstract: Cosmic-ray interactions with the atmosphere produce a flux of neutrinos in all directions with energies extending above the TeV scale(1). The Earth is not a fully transparent medium for neutrinos with energies above a few TeV, as the neutrinonucleon cross-section is large enough to make the absorption probability non-negligible(2). Since absorption depends on energy and distance travelled, studying the distribution of the TeV atmospheric neutrinos passing through the Earth offers an opportunity to infer its density profiles(3-7). This has never been done, however, due to the lack of relevant data. Here we perform a neutrino-based tomography of the Earth using actual data-one-year of through-going muon atmospheric neutrino data collected by the IceCube telescope(8). Using only weak interactions, in a way that is completely independent of gravitational measurements, we are able to determine the mass of the Earth and its core, its moment of inertia, and to establish that the core is denser than the mantle. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach to study the Earth's internal structure, which is complementary to traditional geophysics methods. Neutrino tomography could become more competitive as soon as more statistics is available, provided that the sources of systematic uncertainties are fully under control.

Abstract: Non-standard interactions in the propagation of neutrinos in matter can lead to significant deviations from expectations within the standard neutrino oscillation framework and atmospheric neutrino detectors have been considered to set constraints. However, most previous works have focused on relatively low-energy atmospheric neutrino data. Here, we consider the one-year high-energy through-going muon data in IceCube, which has been already used to search for light sterile neutrinos, to constrain new interactions in the μtau-sector. In our analysis we include several systematic uncertainties on both, the atmospheric neutrino flux and on the detector properties, which are accounted for via nuisance parameters. After considering different primary cosmic-ray spectra and hadronic interaction models, we improve over previous analysis by using the latest data and showing that systematics currently affect very little the bound on the off-diagonal epsilon(mu tau), with the 90% credible interval given by -6.0 x 10(-3) < epsilon(mu tau) < 5.4 x 10(-3), comparable to previous results. In addition, we also estimate the expected sensitivity after 10 years of collected data in IceCube and study the precision at which non-standard parameters could be determined for the case of epsilon(mu tau) near its current bound.

Abstract: We present a numeric method for the analysis of the fermion mass matrices predicted in flavour models. The method does not require any previous algebraic work, it offers a chi(2) comparison test and an easy estimate of confidence intervals. It can also be used to study the stability of the results when the predictions are disturbed by small perturbations. We have applied the method to the case of two-zero neutrino mass textures using the latest available fits on neutrino oscillations, derived the available parameter space for each texture and compared them. Textures A(1) and A(2) seem favoured because they give a small chi(2), allow for large regions in parameter space and give neutrino masses compatible with Cosmology limits. The other “allowed” textures remain allowed although with a very constrained parameter space, which, in some cases, could be in conflict with Cosmology. We have also revisited the “forbidden” textures and studied the stability of the results when the texture zeroes are not exact. Most of the forbidden textures remain forbidden, but textures F-1 and F-3 are particularly sensitive to small perturbations and could become allowed.

Abstract: We study the impact of non-standard momentum distributions of cosmic neutrinos on the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum of the large scale structure. We show that the neutrino distribution has almost no unique observable imprint, as it is almost entirely degenerate with the effective number of neutrino flavours, N-eff, and the neutrino mass, m(nu). Performing a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis with current cosmological data, we demonstrate that the neutrino mass bound heavily depends on the assumed momentum distribution of relic neutrinos. The message of this work is simple and has to our knowledge not been pointed out clearly before: cosmology allows that neutrinos have larger masses if their average momentum is larger than that of a perfectly thermal distribution. Here we provide an example in which the mass limits are relaxed by a factor of two.