Vincent, A. C., Fernandez Martinez, E., Hernandez, P., Mena, O., & Lattanzi, M. (2015). Revisiting cosmological bounds on sterile neutrinos. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 04(4), 006–23pp.
Abstract: We employ state-of-the art cosmological observables including supernova surveys and BAO information to provide constraints on the mass and mixing angle of a non-resonantly produced sterile neutrino species, showing that cosmology can effectively rule out sterile neutrinos which decay between BBN and the present day. The decoupling of an additional heavy neutrino species can modify the time dependence of the Universe's expansion between BBN and recombination and, in extreme cases, lead to an additional matter-dominated period; while this could naively lead to a younger Universe with a larger Hubble parameter, it could later be compensated by the extra radiation expected in the form of neutrinos from sterile decay. However, recombination-era observables including the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the shift parameter R-CMB and the sound horizon r(s) from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) severely constrain this scenario. We self-consistently include the full time-evolution of the coupled sterile neutrino and standard model sectors in an MCMC, showing that if decay occurs after BBN, the sterile neutrino is essentially bounded by the constraint sin(2) theta less than or similar to 0.026(m(s)/eV)(-2).
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ANTARES Collaboration(Adrian-Martinez, S. et al), Barrios-Marti, J., Gomez-Gonzalez, J. P., Hernandez-Rey, J. J., Lambard, G., Mangano, S., et al. (2014). Searches for Point-like and extended neutrino sources close to the Galactic Centre using the ANTARES neutrino Telescope. Astrophys. J. Lett., 786(1), L5–5pp.
Abstract: A search for cosmic neutrino sources using six years of data collected by the ANTARES neutrino telescope has been performed. Clusters of muon neutrinos over the expected atmospheric background have been looked for. No clear signal has been found. The most signal-like accumulation of events is located at equatorial coordinates R.A. = -46 degrees.8 and decl. = -64 degrees.9 and corresponds to a 2.2 sigma background fluctuation. In addition, upper limits on the flux normalization of an E-2 muon neutrino energy spectrum have been set for 50 pre-selected astrophysical objects. Finally, motivated by an accumulation of seven events relatively close to the Galactic Center in the recently reported neutrino sample of the IceCube telescope, a search for point sources in a broad region around this accumulation has been carried out. No indication of a neutrino signal has been found in the ANTARES data and upper limits on the flux normalization of an E-2 energy spectrum of neutrinos from point sources in that region have been set. The 90% confidence level upper limits on the muon neutrino flux normalization vary between 3.5 and 5.1 x 10(-8) GeV cm(-2) s(-1), depending on the exact location of the source.
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Moline, A., Ibarra, A., & Palomares-Ruiz, S. (2015). Future sensitivity of neutrino telescopes to dark matter annihilations from the cosmic diffuse neutrino signal. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 06(6), 005–34pp.
Abstract: Cosmological observations and cold dark matter N-body simulations indicate that our Universe is populated by numerous halos, where dark matter particles annihilate, potentially producing Standard Model particles. In this paper we calculate the contribution to the diffuse neutrino background from dark matter annihilations in halos at all redshifts and we estimate the future sensitivity to the annihilation cross section of neutrino telescopes such as IceCube or ANTARES. We consider various parametrizations to describe the internal halo properties and for the halo mass function in order to bracket the theoretical uncertainty in the limits from the modeling of the cosmological annihilation flux. We find that observations of the cosmic diffuse neutrino flux at large angular distances from the galactic center lead to constraints on the dark matter annihilation cross section which are complementary to ( and for some extrapolations of the astrophysical parameters, better than) those stemming from observations of the Milky Way halo, especially for neutrino telescopes not pointing directly to the Milky Way center, as is the case of IceCube.
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Bertone, G., Cumberbatch, D., Ruiz de Austri, R., & Trotta, R. (2012). Dark Matter searches: the nightmare scenario. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 01(1), 004–24pp.
Abstract: The unfortunate case where the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) fails to discover physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) is sometimes referred to as the “Nightmare scenario” of particle physics. We study the consequences of this hypothetical scenario for Dark Matter (DM), in the framework of the constrained Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (cMSSM). We evaluate the surviving regions of the cMSSM parameter space after null searches at the LHC, using several different LHC configurations, and study the consequences for DM searches with ton-scale direct detectors and the IceCube neutrino telescope. We demonstrate that ton-scale direct detection experiments will be able to conclusively probe the cMSSM parameter space that would survive null searches at the LHC with 100 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity at 14TeV. We also demonstrate that IceCube (80 strings plus DeepCore) will be able to probe as much as similar or equal to 17% of the currently favoured parameter space after 5 years of observation.
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Pierre Auger Collaboration(Abreu, P. et al), & Pastor, S. (2012). Search for Point-like Sources of Ultra-high Energy Neutrinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory and Improved Limit on the Diffuse Flux of Tau Neutrinos. Astrophys. J. Lett., 755(1), L4–7pp.
Abstract: The surface detector array of the Pierre Auger Observatory can detect neutrinos with energy E-nu between 10(17) eV and 10(20) eV from point-like sources across the sky south of +55 degrees and north of -65 degrees declinations. A search has been performed for highly inclined extensive air showers produced by the interaction of neutrinos of all flavors in the atmosphere (downward-going neutrinos), and by the decay of tau leptons originating from tau neutrino interactions in Earth's crust (Earth-skimming neutrinos). No candidate neutrinos have been found in data up to 2010 May 31. This corresponds to an equivalent exposure of similar to 3.5 years of a full surface detector array for the Earth-skimming channel and similar to 2 years for the downward-going channel. An improved upper limit on the diffuse flux of tau neutrinos has been derived. Upper limits on the neutrino flux from point-like sources have been derived as a function of the source declination. Assuming a differential neutrino flux k(PS) . E-nu(-2). from a point-like source, 90% confidence level upper limits for k(PS) at the level of approximate to 5x10(-7) and 2.5x10(-6) GeV cm(-2) s(-1) have been obtained over a broad range of declinations from the searches for Earth-skimming and downward-going neutrinos, respectively.
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Serenelli, A., Scott, P., Villante, F. L., Vincent, A. C., Asplund, M., Basu, S., et al. (2016). Implications of solar wind measurements for solar models and composition. Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 463(1), 2–9.
Abstract: We critically examine recent claims of a high solar metallicity by von Steiger & Zurbuchen (2016, vSZ16) based onin situ measurements of the solar wind, rather than the standard spectroscopically inferred abundances (Asplund et al. 2009, hereafter AGSS09). We test the claim by Vagnozzi et al. (2016) that a composition based on the solar wind enables one to construct a standard solar model in agreement with helioseismological observations and thus solve the decades-old solar modelling problem. We show that, although some helioseismological observables are improved compared to models computed with spectroscopic abundances, most are in fact worse. The high abundance of refractory elements leads to an overproduction of neutrinos, with a predicted B-8 flux that is nearly twice its observed value, and Be-7 and CNO fluxes that are experimentally ruled out at high confidence. A combined likelihood analysis shows that models using the vSZ16 abundances are worse than AGSS09 despite a higher metallicity. We also present astrophysical and spectroscopic arguments showing the vSZ16 composition to be an implausible representation of the solar interior, identifying the first ionization potential effect in the outer solar atmosphere and wind as the likely culprit.
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Martinez-Mirave, P., Tamborra, I., & Tortola, M. (2024). The Sun and core-collapse supernovae are leading probes of the neutrino lifetime. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 05(5), 002–39pp.
Abstract: The large distances travelled by neutrinos emitted from the Sun and core -collapse supernovae together with the characteristic energy of such neutrinos provide ideal conditions to probe their lifetime, when the decay products evade detection. We investigate the prospects of probing invisible neutrino decay capitalising on the detection of solar and supernova neutrinos as well as the diffuse supernova neutrino background (DSNB) in the next -generation neutrino observatories Hyper-Kamiokande, DUNE, JUNO, DARWIN, and RES-NOVA. We find that future solar neutrino data will be sensitive to values of the lifetime -to -mass ratio tau 1 /m 1 and tau 2 /m 2 of O(10 – 1 -10 – 2 ) s/eV. From a core -collapse supernova explosion at 10 kpc, lifetime -to -mass ratios of the three mass eigenstates of O(10 5 ) s/eV could be tested. After 20 years of data taking, the DSNB would extend the sensitivity reach of tau 1 /m 1 to 10 8 s/eV. These results promise an improvement of about 6-15 orders of magnitude on the values of the decay parameters with respect to existing limits.
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Mangano, G., Miele, G., Pastor, S., Pisanti, O., & Sarikas, S. (2012). Updated BBN bounds on the cosmological lepton asymmetry for non-zero theta(13). Phys. Lett. B, 708(1-2), 1–5.
Abstract: We discuss the bounds on the cosmological lepton number from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), in light of recent evidences for a large value of the neutrino mixing angle theta(13), sin(2) theta(13) greater than or similar to 0.01 at 2 sigma. The largest asymmetries for electron and mu, tau neutrinos compatible with He-4 and H-2 primordial yields are computed versus the neutrino mass hierarchy and mixing angles. The flavour oscillation dynamics is traced till the beginning of BBN and neutrino distributions after decoupling are numerically computed. The latter contains in general, non-thermal distortion due to the onset of flavour oscillations driven by solar squared mass difference in the temperature range where neutrino scatterings become inefficient to enforce thermodynamical equilibrium. Depending on the value of theta(13), this translates into a larger value for the effective number of neutrinos, N-eff. Upper bounds on this parameter are discussed for both neutrino mass hierarchies. Values for N-eff which are large enough to be detectable by the Planck experiment are found only for the (presently disfavoured) range sin(2) theta(13) <= 0.01.
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Fernandez-Martinez, E., Gonzalez-Lopez, M., Hernandez-Garcia, J., Hostert, M., & Lopez-Pavon, J. (2023). Effective portals to heavy neutral leptons. J. High Energy Phys., 09(9), 001–45pp.
Abstract: The existence of right-handed neutrinos, or heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), is strongly motivated by the observation of neutrino masses and mixing. The mass of these new particles could lie below the electroweak scale, making them accessible to lowenergy laboratory experiments. Additional new physics at high energies can mediate new interactions between the Standard Model particles and HNLs, and is most conveniently parametrized by the neutrino Standard Model Effective Field Theory, or nu SMEFT for short. In this work, we consider the dimension six nu SMEFT operators involving one HNL field in the mass range of O(1) MeV < MN < O(100) GeV. By recasting existing experimental limits on the production and decay of new light particles, we constrain the Wilson coefficients and new physics scale of each operator as a function of the HNL mass.
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