|
Fernandez-Martinez, E., Giordano, G., Mena, O., & Mocioiu, I. (2010). Atmospheric neutrinos in ice and measurement of neutrino oscillation parameters. Phys. Rev. D, 82(9), 093011–7pp.
Abstract: The main goal of the IceCube Deep Core array is to search for neutrinos of astrophysical origins. Atmospheric neutrinos are commonly considered as a background for these searches. We show that the very high statistics atmospheric neutrino data can be used to obtain precise measurements of the main oscillation parameters.
|
|
|
Agarwalla, S. K., Blennow, M., Fernandez-Martinez, E., & Mena, O. (2011). Neutrino probes of the nature of light dark matter. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 09(9), 004–19pp.
Abstract: Dark matter particles gravitationally trapped inside the Sun may annihilate into Standard Model particles, producing a flux of neutrinos. The prospects of detecting these neutrinos in future multi-kt neutrino detectors designed for other physics searches are explored here. We study the capabilities of a 34/100 kt liquid argon detector and a 100 kt magnetized iron calorimeter detector. These detectors are expected to determine the energy and the direction of the incoming neutrino with unprecedented precision allowing for tests of the dark matter nature at very low dark matter masses, in the range of 10-25 GeV. By suppressing the atmospheric background with angular cuts, these techniques would be sensitive to dark matter-nucleon spin-dependent cross sections at the fb level, reaching down to a few ab for the most favorable annihilation channels and detector technology.
|
|
|
De Romeri, V., Fernandez-Martinez, E., & Sorel, M. (2016). Neutrino oscillations at DUNE with improved energy reconstruction. J. High Energy Phys., 09(9), 030–25pp.
Abstract: We study the physics reach of the long-baseline oscillation analysis of the DUNE experiment when realistic simulations are used to estimate its neutrino energy reconstruction capabilities. Our studies indicate that significant improvements in energy resolution compared to what is customarily assumed are plausible. This improved energy resolution can increase the sensitivity to leptonic CP violation in two ways. On the one hand, the CP-violating term in the oscillation probability has a characteristic energy dependence that can be better reproduced. On the other hand, the second oscillation maximum, especially sensitive to delta(CP), is better reconstructed. These effects lead to a significant improvement in the fraction of values of delta(CP) for which a 5 sigma discovery of leptonic CP-violation would be possible. The precision of the delta(CP) measurement could also be greatly enhanced, with a reduction of the maximum uncertainties from 26 degrees to 18 degrees for a 300 MW.kt.yr exposure. We therefore believe that this potential gain in physics reach merits further investigations of the detector performance achievable in DUNE.
|
|
|
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.
|
|