Abstract: The framed standard model (FSM), constructed to explain, with some success, why there should be three and apparently only three generations of quarks and leptons in nature falling into a hierarchical mass and mixing pattern,(10) suggests also, among other things, a scalar boson U, with mass around 17 MeV and small couplings to quarks and leptons,(11) which might explain(9) the g – 2 anomaly reported in experiment.(12) The U arises in FSM initially as a state in the predicted “hidden sector” with mass around 17 MeV, which mixes with the standard model (SM) Higgs h(W), acquiring thereby a coupling to quarks and leptons and a mass just below 17 MeV. The initial purpose of this paper is to check whether this proposal is compatible with experiment on semileptonic decays of Ks and Bs where the U can also appear. The answer to this we find is affirmative, in that the contribution of U to new physics as calculated in the FSM remains within the experimental bounds, but only if m(U) lies within a narrow range just below the unmixed mass. As a result from this, one has an estimate m(U) similar to 15-17 MeV for the mass of U, and from some further considerations the estimate Gamma(U) similar to 0.02 eV for its width, both of which may be useful for an eventual search for it in experiment. If found, it will be, for the FSM, not just the discovery of a predicted new particle, but the opening of a window into a whole “hidden sector” containing at least some, perhaps even the bulk, of the dark matter in the universe.

Abstract: Deviations from unitarity in the three-neutrino mixing canonical picture are expected in many physics scenarios beyond the Standard Model. The mixing of new heavy neutral leptons with the three light neutrinos would in principle modify the strength and flavour structure of charged-current and neutral-current interactions with matter. Non-unitarity effects would therefore have an impact on the neutrino decoupling processes in the early Universe and on the value of the effective number of neutrinos, Neff. We calculate the cosmological energy density in the form of radiation with a non-unitary neutrino mixing matrix, addressing the possible interplay between parameters. Highly accurate measurements of Neff from forthcoming cosmological observations can provide independent and complementary limits on the departures from unitarity. For completeness, we relate the scenario of small deviations from unitarity to non-standard neutrino interactions and compare the forecasted constraints to other existing limits in the literature.

Abstract: Dark-matter particles that annihilate or decay can undergo complex sequences of processes, including strong and electromagnetic radiation, hadronisation, and hadron de-cays, before particles that are stable on astrophysical time scales are produced. Antiprotons produced in this way may leave footprints in experiments such as AMS-02. Several groups have reported an excess of events in the antiproton flux in the rigidity range of 10-20 GV. However, the theoretical modeling of baryon production is not straightforward and relies in part on phenomenological models in Monte Carlo event generators. In this work, we assess the impact of QCD uncertainties on the spectra of antiprotons from dark-matter annihila-tion. As a proof-of-principle, we show that for a two-parameter model that depends only on the thermally-averaged annihilation cross section ((o -v)) and the dark-matter mass (Mx), QCD uncertainties can affect the best-fit mass by up to ti 14% (with large uncertainties for large DM masses), depending on the choice of Mx and the annihilation channel (bb over bar or W+W-), and (o -v) by up to ti 10%. For comparison, changes to the underlying diffusion parameters are found to be within 1%-5%, and the results are also quite resilient to the choice of cosmic-ray propagation model. These findings indicate that QCD uncertainties need to be included in future DM analyses. To facilitate full-fledged analyses, we provide the spectra in tabulated form including QCD uncertainties and code snippets to perform mass interpolations and quick DM fits. The code can be found in this GitHub [1] repository.