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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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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Semikoz, V. B., & Valle, J. W. F. (2011). Chern-Simons anomaly as polarization effect. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 11(11), 048.
Abstract: The parity violating, Chern-Simons term in the epoch before the electroweak phase transition can be interpreted as a polarization effect associated to massless right-handed electrons (positrons) in the presence of a large-scale seed hypermagnetic field. We reconfirm the viability of a unified seed field scenario relating the cosmological baryon asymmetry and the origin of the protogalactic large-scale magnetic fields observed in astronomy.
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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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Bringmann, T., Donato, F., & Lineros, R. A. (2012). Radio data and synchrotron emission in consistent cosmic ray models. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 01(1), 049–12pp.
Abstract: It is well established that phenomenological two-zone diffusion models of the galactic halo can very well reproduce cosmic-ray nuclear data and the observed antiproton flux. Here, we consider lepton propagation in such models and compute the expected galactic population of electrons, as well as the diffuse synchrotron emission that results from their interaction with galactic magnetic fields. We find models in agreement not only with cosmic ray data but also with radio surveys at essentially all frequencies. Requiring such a globally consistent description strongly disfavors very large (L greater than or similar to 15 kpc) and, even stronger, small (L less than or similar to 1 kpc) effective diffusive halo sizes. This has profound implications for, e.g., in direct dark matter searches.
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