Chakraborty, S., Gupta, A., & Vanvlasselaer, M. (2023). Anomaly induced cooling of neutron stars: a Standard Model contribution. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 10(10), 030–23pp.
Abstract: Young neutron stars cool via the emission of neutrinos from their core. A precise understanding of all the different processes producing neutrinos in the hot and degenerate matter is essential for assessing the cooling rate of such stars. The main Standard Model processes contributing to this effect are nu bremsstrahlung, mURCA among others. In this paper, we investigate another Standard Model process initiated by the Wess-Zumino-Witten term, leading to the emission of neutrino pairs via N gamma -> N nu nu over bar . We find that for proto-neutron stars, such processes with degenerate neutrons can be comparable and even dominate over the typical and well-known cooling mechanisms.
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NEXT Collaboration, Carcel, S., Carrion, J. V., Felkai, R., Kekic, M., Lopez-March, N., et al. (2020). Mitigation of backgrounds from cosmogenic Xe-137 in xenon gas experiments using He-3 neutron capture. J. Phys. G, 47(7), 075001–17pp.
Abstract: Xe-136 is used as the target medium for many experiments searching for 0 nu beta beta. Despite underground operation, cosmic muons that reach the laboratory can produce spallation neutrons causing activation of detector materials. A potential background that is difficult to veto using muon tagging comes in the form of Xe-137 created by the capture of neutrons on Xe-136. This isotope decays via beta decay with a half-life of 3.8 min and a Q(beta) of similar to 4.16 MeV. This work proposes and explores the concept of adding a small percentage of He-3 to xenon as a means to capture thermal neutrons and reduce the number of activations in the detector volume. When using this technique we find the contamination from Xe-137 activation can be reduced to negligible levels in tonne and multi-tonne scale high pressure gas xenon neutrinoless double beta decay experiments running at any depth in an underground laboratory.
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Farzan, Y., & Palomares-Ruiz, S. (2019). Flavor of cosmic neutrinos preserved by ultralight dark matter. Phys. Rev. D, 99(5), 051702–8pp.
Abstract: Within the standard propagation scenario, the flavor ratios of high-energy cosmic neutrinos at neutrino telescopes are expected to be around the democratic benchmark resulting from hadronic sources, (1/3:1/3:1/3)(circle plus). We show how the coupling of neutrinos to an ultralight dark matter complex scalar field would induce an effective neutrino mass that could lead to adiabatic neutrino propagation. This would result in the preservation at the detector of the production flavor composition of neutrinos at sources. This effect could lead to flavor ratios at detectors well outside the range predicted by the standard scenario of averaged oscillations. We also present an electroweak-invariant model that would lead to the required effective interaction between neutrinos and dark matter.
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Husek, T., Monsalvez-Pozo, K., & Portoles, J. (2021). Lepton-flavour violation in hadronic tau decays and mu-tau conversion in nuclei. J. High Energy Phys., 01(1), 059–48pp.
Abstract: Within the Standard Model Effective Field Theory framework, with operators up to dimension 6, we perform a model-independent analysis of the lepton-flavour-violating processes involving tau leptons. Namely, we study hadronic tau decays and l-tau conversion in nuclei, with l = e, mu. Based on available experimental limits, we establish constraints on the Wilson coefficients of the operators contributing to these processes. Our work paves the way to extract the related information from Belle II and foreseen future experiments.
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Kpatcha, E., Lara, I., Lopez-Fogliani, D. E., Muñoz, C., Nagata, N., Otono, H., et al. (2019). Sampling the μnu SSM for displaced decays of the tau left sneutrino LSP at the LHC. Eur. Phys. J. C, 79(11), 934–18pp.
Abstract: Within the framework of the μnu SSM, a displaced dilepton signal is expected at the LHC from the decay of a tau left sneutrino as the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) with a mass in the range 45-100 GeV. We compare the predictions of this scenario with the ATLAS search for long-lived particles using displaced lepton pairs in pp collisions, considering an optimization of the trigger requirements by means of a high level trigger that exploits tracker information. The analysis is carried out in the general case of three families of right-handed neutrino superfields, where all the neutrinos get contributions to their masses at tree level. To analyze the parameter space, we sample the μnu SSM for a tau left sneutrino LSP with proper decay length c tau>0.1mm using a likelihood data-driven method, and paying special attention to reproduce the current experimental data on neutrino and Higgs physics, as well as flavor observables. The sneutrino is special in the μnu SSM since its couplings have to be chosen so that the neutrino oscillation data are reproduced. We find that important regions of the parameter space can be probed at the LHC run 3.
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