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Helo, J. C., Hirsch, M., & Ota, T. (2018). Proton decay and light sterile neutrinos. J. High Energy Phys., 06(6), 047–15pp.
Abstract: Within the standard model, non-renormalizable operators at dimension six (d = 6) violate baryon and lepton number by one unit and thus lead to proton decay. Here, we point out that the proton decay mode with a charged pion and missing energy can be a characteristic signature of d = 6 operators containing a light sterile neutrino, if it is not accompanied by the standard pi(0)e(+) final state. We discuss this effect first at the level of effective operators and then provide a concrete model with new physics at the TeV scale, in which the lightness of the active neutrinos and the stability of the proton are related.
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Arguelles, C. A., Palomares-Ruiz, S., Schneider, A., Wille, L., & Yuan, T. L. (2018). Unified atmospheric neutrino passing fractions for large-scale neutrino telescopes. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 07(7), 047–41pp.
Abstract: The atmospheric neutrino passing fraction, or self-veto, is defined as the probability for an atmospheric neutrino not to be accompanied by a detectable muon from the same cosmic-ray air shower. Building upon previous work, we propose a redefinition of the passing fractions by unifying the treatment for muon and electron neutrinos. Several approximations have also been removed. This enables performing detailed estimations of the uncertainties in the passing fractions from several inputs: muon losses, cosmic-ray spectrum, hadronic-interaction models and atmosphere-density profiles. We also study the passing fractions under variations of the detector configuration: depth, surrounding medium and muon veto trigger probability. The calculation exhibits excellent agreement with passing fractions obtained from Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, we provide a general software framework to implement this veto technique for all large-scale neutrino observatories.
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Lopez-Ibañez, M. L., Melis, A., Meloni, D., & Vives, O. (2019). Lepton flavor violation and neutrino masses from A(5) and CP in the non-universal MSSM. J. High Energy Phys., 06(6), 047–34pp.
Abstract: We analyze the phenomenological consequences of embedding a flavor symmetry based on the groups A(5) and CP in a supersymmetric framework. We concentrate on the leptonic sector, where two different residual symmetries are assumed to be conserved at leading order for charged and neutral leptons. All possible realizations to generate neutrino masses at tree level are investigated. Sizable flavor violating effects in the charged lepton sector are unavoidable due to the non-universality of soft-breaking terms determined by the symmetry. We derive testable predictions for the neutrino spectrum, lepton mixing and flavor changing processes with non-trivial relations among observables.
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PTOLEMY Collaboration(Betti, M. G. et al), Gariazzo, S., & Pastor, S. (2019). Neutrino physics with the PTOLEMY project: active neutrino properties and the light sterile case. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 07(7), 047–31pp.
Abstract: The PTOLEMY project aims to develop a scalable design for a Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB) detector, the first of its kind and the only one conceived that can look directly at the image of the Universe encoded in neutrino background produced in the first second after the Big Bang. The scope of the work for the next three years is to complete the conceptual design of this detector and to validate with direct measurements that the non-neutrino backgrounds are below the expected cosmological signal. In this paper we discuss in details the theoretical aspects of the experiment and its physics goals. In particular, we mainly address three issues. First we discuss the sensitivity of PTOLEMY to the standard neutrino mass scale. We then study the perspectives of the experiment to detect the CNB via neutrino capture on tritium as a function of the neutrino mass scale and the energy resolution of the apparatus. Finally, we consider an extra sterile neutrino with mass in the eV range, coupled to the active states via oscillations, which has been advocated in view of neutrino oscillation anomalies. This extra state would contribute to the tritium decay spectrum, and its properties, mass and mixing angle, could be studied by analyzing the features in the beta decay electron spectrum.
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Barenboim, G., & Park, W. I. (2017). A full picture of large lepton number asymmetries of the Universe. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 04(4), 048–10pp.
Abstract: A large lepton number asymmetry of O(0.1-1) at present Universe might not only be allowed but also necessary for consistency among cosmological data. We show that, if a sizeable lepton number asymmetry were produced before the electroweak phase transition, the requirement for not producing too much baryon number asymmetry through sphalerons processes, forces the high scale lepton number asymmetry to be larger than about 30. Therefore a mild entropy release causing O(10-100) suppression of pre-existing particle density should take place, when the background temperature of the Universe is around T = O(10(-2) -10(2)) GeV for a large but experimentally consistent asymmetry to be present today. We also show that such a mild entropy production can be obtained by the late-time decays of the saxion, constraining the parameters of the Peccei-Quinn sector such as the mass and the vacuum expectation value of the saxion field to be m(phi) greater than or similar to O(10) TeV and phi(0) greater than or similar to O(10(14)) GeV, respectively.
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Falkowski, A., Gonzalez-Alonso, M., & Tabrizi, Z. (2020). Consistent QFT description of non-standard neutrino interactions. J. High Energy Phys., 11(11), 048–23pp.
Abstract: Neutrino oscillations are precision probes of new physics. Apart from neutrino masses and mixings, they are also sensitive to possible deviations of low-energy interactions between quarks and leptons from the Standard Model predictions. In this paper we develop a systematic description of such non-standard interactions (NSI) in oscillation experiments within the quantum field theory framework. We calculate the event rate and oscillation probability in the presence of general NSI, starting from the effective field theory (EFT) in which new physics modifies the flavor or Lorentz structure of charged-current interactions between leptons and quarks. We also provide the matching between the EFT Wilson coefficients and the widely used simplified quantum-mechanical approach, where new physics is encoded in a set of production and detection NSI parameters. Finally, we discuss the consistency conditions for the standard NSI approach to correctly reproduce the quantum field theory result.
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ANTARES Collaboration(Albert, A. et al), Alves, S., Calvo, D., Carretero, V., Gozzini, R., Hernandez-Rey, J. J., et al. (2022). Search for non-standard neutrino interactions with 10 years of ANTARES data. J. High Energy Phys., 07(7), 048–22pp.
Abstract: Non-standard interactions of neutrinos arising in many theories beyond the Standard Model can significantly alter matter effects in atmospheric neutrino propagation through the Earth. In this paper, a search for deviations from the prediction of the standard 3-flavour atmospheric neutrino oscillations using the data taken by the ANTARES neutrino telescope is presented. Ten years of atmospheric neutrino data collected from 2007 to 2016, with reconstructed energies in the range from similar to 16 GeV to 100 GeV, have been analysed. A log-likelihood ratio test of the dimensionless coefficients epsilon(mu tau) and epsilon(tau tau) – epsilon(mu mu) does not provide clear evidence of deviations from standard interactions. For normal neutrino mass ordering, the combined fit of both coefficients yields a value 1.7 sigma away from the null result. However, the 68% and 95% confidence level intervals for epsilon(mu tau) and epsilon(tau tau) – epsilon(mu mu), respectively, contain the null value. Best fit values, one standard deviation errors and bounds at the 90% confidence level for these coefficients are given for both normal and inverted mass orderings. The constraint on epsilon(mu tau) is among the most stringent to date and it further restrains the strength of possible non-standard interactions in the μ- tau sector.
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Alcaide, J., Das, D., & Santamaria, A. (2017). A model of neutrino mass and dark matter with large neutrinoless double beta decay. J. High Energy Phys., 04(4), 049–21pp.
Abstract: We propose a model where neutrino masses are generated at three loop order but neutrinoless double beta decay occurs at one loop. Thus we can have large neutrinoless double beta decay observable in the future experiments even when the neutrino masses are very small. The model receives strong constraints from the neutrino data and lepton flavor violating decays, which substantially reduces the number of free parameters. Our model also opens up the possibility of having several new scalars below the TeV regime, which can be explored at the collider experiments. Additionally, our model also has an unbroken Z(2) symmetry which allows us to identify a viable Dark Matter candidate.
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Oldengott, I. M., Barenboim, G., Kahlen, S., Salvado, J., & Schwarz, D. J. (2019). How to relax the cosmological neutrino mass bound. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 04(4), 049–18pp.
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.
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de Gouvea, A., De Romeri, V., & Ternes, C. A. (2020). Probing neutrino quantum decoherence at reactor experiments. J. High Energy Phys., 08(8), 049–17pp.
Abstract: We explore how well reactor antineutrino experiments can constrain or measure the loss of quantum coherence in neutrino oscillations. We assume that decoherence effects are encoded in the size of the neutrino wave-packet, sigma. We find that the current experiments Daya Bay and the Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillation (RENO) already constrain sigma >1.0x10(-4) nm and estimate that future data from the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) would be sensitive to sigma <2.1x10(-3) nm. If the effects of loss of coherence are within the sensitivity of JUNO, we expect sigma to be measured with good precision. The discovery of nontrivial decoherence effects in JUNO would indicate that our understanding of the coherence of neutrino sources is, at least, incomplete.
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