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Coloma, P., Esteban, I., Gonzalez-Garcia, M. C., & Menendez, J. (2020). Determining the nuclear neutron distribution from Coherent Elastic neutrino-Nucleus Scattering: current results and future prospects. J. High Energy Phys., 08(8), 030–22pp.
Abstract: Coherent Elastic neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CE nu NS), a process recently measured for the first time at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source, is directly sensitive to the weak form factor of the nucleus. The European Spallation Source (ESS), presently under construction, will generate the most intense pulsed neutrino flux suitable for the detection of CE nu NS. In this paper we quantify its potential to determine the root mean square radius of the point-neutron distribution, for a variety of target nuclei and a suite of detectors. To put our results in context we also derive, for the first time, a constraint on this parameter from the analysis of the energy and timing data of the CsI detector at the COHERENT experiment.
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HAWC Collaboration(Albert, A. et al), & Salesa Greus, F. (2021). Evidence of 200 TeV Photons from HAWC J1825-134. Astrophys. J. Lett., 907(2), L30–9pp.
Abstract: The Earth is bombarded by ultrarelativistic particles, known as cosmic rays (CRs). CRs with energies up to a few PeV (=10(15) eV), the knee in the particle spectrum, are believed to have a Galactic origin. One or more factories of PeV CRs, or PeVatrons, must thus be active within our Galaxy. The direct detection of PeV protons from their sources is not possible since they are deflected in the Galactic magnetic fields. Hundred TeV gamma-rays from decaying pi(0), produced when PeV CRs collide with the ambient gas, can provide the decisive evidence of proton acceleration up to the knee. Here we report the discovery by the High Altitude Water Cerenkov (HAWC) observatory of the gamma-ray source, HAWC J1825-134, whose energy spectrum extends well beyond 200 TeV without a break or cutoff. The source is found to be coincident with a giant molecular cloud. The ambient gas density is as high as 700 protons cm(-3). While the nature of this extreme accelerator remains unclear, CRs accelerated to energies of several PeV colliding with the ambient gas likely produce the observed radiation.
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Villanueva-Domingo, P., Villaescusa-Navarro, F., Angles-Alcazar, D., Genel, S., Marinacci, F., Spergel, D. N., et al. (2022). Inferring Halo Masses with Graph Neural Networks. Astrophys. J., 935(1), 30–15pp.
Abstract: Understanding the halo-galaxy connection is fundamental in order to improve our knowledge on the nature and properties of dark matter. In this work, we build a model that infers the mass of a halo given the positions, velocities, stellar masses, and radii of the galaxies it hosts. In order to capture information from correlations among galaxy properties and their phase space, we use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which are designed to work with irregular and sparse data. We train our models on galaxies from more than 2000 state-of-the-art simulations from the Cosmology and Astrophysics with MachinE Learning Simulations project. Our model, which accounts for cosmological and astrophysical uncertainties, is able to constrain the masses of the halos with a similar to 0.2 dex accuracy. Furthermore, a GNN trained on a suite of simulations is able to preserve part of its accuracy when tested on simulations run with a different code that utilizes a distinct subgrid physics model, showing the robustness of our method. The PyTorch Geometric implementation of the GNN is publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/PabloVD/HaloGraphNet).
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Alonso, I. et al, & Bernabeu, J. (2022). Cold atoms in space: community workshop summary and proposed road-map. EPJ Quantum Technol., 9(1), 30–55pp.
Abstract: We summarise the discussions at a virtual Community Workshop on Cold Atoms in Space concerning the status of cold atom technologies, the prospective scientific and societal opportunities offered by their deployment in space, and the developments needed before cold atoms could be operated in space. The cold atom technologies discussed include atomic clocks, quantum gravimeters and accelerometers, and atom interferometers. Prospective applications include metrology, geodesy and measurement of terrestrial mass change due to, e.g., climate change, and fundamental science experiments such as tests of the equivalence principle, searches for dark matter, measurements of gravitational waves and tests of quantum mechanics. We review the current status of cold atom technologies and outline the requirements for their space qualification, including the development paths and the corresponding technical milestones, and identifying possible pathfinder missions to pave the way for missions to exploit the full potential of cold atoms in space. Finally, we present a first draft of a possible road-map for achieving these goals, that we propose for discussion by the interested cold atom, Earth Observation, fundamental physics and other prospective scientific user communities, together with the European Space Agency (ESA) and national space and research funding agencies.
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Blennow, M., Fernandez-Martinez, E., Hernandez-Garcia, J., Lopez-Pavon, J., Marcano, X., & Naredo-Tuero, D. (2023). Bounds on lepton non-unitarity and heavy neutrino mixing. J. High Energy Phys., 08(8), 030–41pp.
Abstract: We present an updated and improved global fit analysis of current flavour and electroweak precision observables to derive bounds on unitarity deviations of the leptonic mixing matrix and on the mixing of heavy neutrinos with the active flavours. This new analysis is motivated by new and updated experimental results on key observables such as V-ud, the invisible decay width of the Z boson and the W boson mass. It also improves upon previous studies by considering the full correlations among the different observables and explicitly calibrating the test statistic, which may present significant deviations from a & chi;(2) distribution. The results are provided for three different Type-I seesaw scenarios: the minimal scenario with only two additional right-handed neutrinos, the next to minimal one with three extra neutrinos, and the most general one with an arbitrary number of heavy neutrinos that we parametrise via a generic deviation from a unitary leptonic mixing matrix. Additionally, we also analyze the case of generic deviations from unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix, not necessarily induced by the presence of additional neutrinos. This last case relaxes some correlations among the parameters and is able to provide a better fit to the data. Nevertheless, inducing only leptonic unitarity deviations avoiding both the correlations implied by the right-handed neutrino extension as well as more strongly constrained operators is challenging and would imply significantly more complex UV completions.
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