Abstract: Light neutralinos could be copiously produced from the decays of mesons generated in cosmic-ray air showers. These neutralinos can be long-lived particles in the context of R-parity violating (RPV) supersymmetric models, implying that they could be capable of reaching the surface of the earth and decay within the instrumental volume of large neutrino detectors. In this article, we use atmospheric neutrino data from the Super-Kamiokande experiment to derive novel constraints for the RPV couplings involved in the production of long-lived light neutralinos from the decays of charged D-mesons and kaons. Our results highlight the potential of neutrino detectors to search for long-lived particles, by demonstrating that it is possible to explore regions of parameter space that are not yet constrained by any fixed-target nor collider experiments.

Abstract: The European Spallation Source (ESS), currently under construction in Sweden, will provide an intense pulsed neutrino flux allowing for high-statistics measurements of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) with advanced nuclear recoil detectors. In this paper, we investigate in detail the possibility of constraining nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSIs) through such precision CEvNS measurements at the ESS, considering the different proposed detection technologies, either alone or in combination. We first study the sensitivity to neutral-current NSI parameters that each detector can reach in 3 years of data taking. We then show that operating two detectors simultaneously can significantly improve the expected sensitivity on flavor-diagonal NSI parameters. Combining the results of two detectors turns out to be even more useful when two NSI parameters are assumed to be nonvanishing at a time. In this case, suitably chosen detector combinations can reduce the degeneracies between some pairs of NSI parameters to a small region of the parameter space.

Abstract: The Schwarzschild-de Sitter (SdS) metric is the simplest spacetime solution in general relativity with both a black hole event horizon and a cosmological event horizon. Since the Schwarzschild metric is the most simple solution of Einstein's equations with spherical symmetry and the de Sitter metric is the most simple solution of Einstein's equations with a positive cosmological constant, the combination in the SdS metric defines an appropriate background geometry for semi-classical investigation of Hawking radiation with respect to past and future horizons. Generally, the black hole temperature is larger than that of the cosmological horizon, so there is heat flow from the smaller black hole horizon to the larger cosmological horizon, despite questions concerning the definition of the relative temperature of the black hole without a measurement by an observer sitting in an asymptotically flat spacetime. Here we investigate the accelerating boundary correspondence of the radiation in SdS spacetime without such a problem. We have solved for the boundary dynamics, energy flux and asymptotic particle spectrum. The distribution of particles is globally non-thermal while asymptotically the radiation reaches equilibrium.

Abstract: The singlet Majoron model of seesaw neutrino mass is appended by one dark Majorana fermion singlet chi with L = 2 and one dark complex scalar singlet zeta with L = 1. This simple setup allows chi to obtain a small radiative mass anchored by the same heavy right-handed neutrinos, whereas the one-loop decay of the standard model Higgs boson to chi chi + (chi) over bar(chi) over bar provides the freeze-in mechanism for chi to be the light dark matter of the Universe.

Abstract: All extensions of the standard model that generate Majorana neutrino masses at the electroweak scale introduce some heavy mediators, either fermions and/or scalars, weakly coupled to leptons. Here, by “heavy,” we mean implicitly the mass range between a few 100 GeV up to, say, roughly 2 TeV, such that these particles can be searched for at the LHC. We study decay widths of these mediators for several different tree-level neutrino mass models. The models we consider range from the simplest d = 5 seesaw up to d = 11 neutrino mass models. For each of the models, we identify the most interesting parts of the parameter space, where the heavy mediator fields are particularly long lived and can decay with experimentally measurable decay lengths. One has to distinguish two different scenarios, depending on whether fermions or scalars are the lighter of the heavy particles. For fermions, we find that the decay lengths correlate with the inverse of the overall neutrino mass scale. Thus, since no lower limit on the lightest neutrino mass exists, nearly arbitrarily long decay lengths can be obtained for the case in which fermions are the lighter of the heavy particles. For charged scalars, on the other hand, there exists a maximum value for the decay length in these models. This maximum value depends on the model and on the electric charge of the scalar under consideration but can at most be of the order of a few millimeters. Interestingly, independent of the model, this maximum occurs always in a region of parameter space, where leptonic and gauge boson final states have similar branching ratios, i.e., where the observation of lepton number-violating final states from scalar decays is possible.