Escribano, P., Hirsch, M., Nava, J., & Vicente, A. (2022). Observable flavor violation from spontaneous lepton number breaking. J. High Energy Phys., 01(1), 098–31pp.
Abstract: We propose a simple model of spontaneous lepton number violation with potentially large flavor violating decays, including the possibility that majoron emitting decays, such as μ-> e J, saturate the experimental bounds. In this model the majoron is a singlet-doublet admixture. It generates a type-I seesaw for neutrino masses and contains also a vector-like lepton. As a by-product, the model can explain the anomalous (g – 2)(mu), in parts of its parameter space, where one expects that the branching ratio of the Higgs to muons is changed with respect to Standard Model expectations. However, the explanation of the muon g – 2 anomaly would lead to tension with recent astrophysical bounds on the majoron coupling to muons.
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Bustamante, M., Gago, A. M., & Pena-Garay, C. (2010). Energy-independent new physics in the flavour ratios of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. J. High Energy Phys., 04(4), 066–28pp.
Abstract: We have studied the consequences of breaking the CPT symmetry in the neutrino sector, using the expected high-energy neutrino flux from distant cosmological sources such as active galaxies. For this purpose we have assumed three different hypotheses for the neutrino production model, characterised by the flavour fluxes at production phi(0)(e) : phi(0)(mu) : phi(0)(tau) = 1 : 2 : 0, 0 : 1 : 0, and 1 : 0 : 0, and studied the theoretical and experimental expectations for the muon-neutrino flux at Earth, phi(mu), and for the flavour ratios at Earth, R = phi(mu)/phi(e) and S = phi(tau)/phi(mu). CPT violation (CPTV) has been implemented by adding an energy-independent term to the standard neutrino oscillation Hamiltonian. This introduces three new mixing angles, two new eigenvalues and three new phases, all of which have currently unknown values. We have varied the new mixing angles and eigenvalues within certain bounds, together with the parameters associated to pure standard oscillations. Our results indicate that, for the models 1 : 2 : 0 and 0 : 1 : 0, it might be possible to find large deviations of phi(mu), R, and S between the cases without and with CPTV, provided the CPTV eigenvalues lie within 10(-29) – 10(-27) GeV, or above. Moreover, if CPTV exists, there are certain values of R and S that can be accounted for by up to three production models. If no CPTV were observed, we could set limits on the CPTV eigenvalues of the same order. Detection prospects calculated using IceCube suggest that for the models 1 : 2 : 0 and 0 : 1 : 0, the modifications due to CPTV are larger and more clearly separable from the standard-oscillations predictions. We conclude that IceCube is potentially able to detect CPTV but that, depending on the values of the CPTV parameters, there could be a mis-determination of the neutrino production model.
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Lavoura, L., Morisi, S., & Valle, J. W. F. (2013). Accidental stability of dark matter. J. High Energy Phys., 02(2), 118–17pp.
Abstract: We propose that dark matter is stable as a consequence of an accidental Z(2) that results from a flavour symmetry group which is the double-cover group of the symmetry group of one of the regular geometric solids. Although model-dependent, the phenomenology resembles that of a generic “inert Higgs” dark matter scheme.
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Miranda, O. G., Papoulias, D. K., Tortola, M., & Valle, J. W. F. (2019). Probing neutrino transition magnetic moments with coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. J. High Energy Phys., 07(7), 103–23pp.
Abstract: We explore the potential of current and next generation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE nu NS) experiments in probing neutrino electromagnetic interactions. On the basis of a thorough statistical analysis, we determine the sensitivities on each component of the Majorana neutrino transition magnetic moment (TMM), vertical bar Lambda(i)vertical bar, that follow from low-energy neutrino-nucleus experiments. We derive the sensitivity to neutrino TMM from the first CE nu NS measurement by the COHERENT experiment, at the Spallation Neutron Source. We also present results for the next phases of COHERENT using HPGe, LAr and NaI[Tl] detectors and for reactor neutrino experiments such as CONUS, CONNIE, MINER, TEXONO and RED100. The role of the CP violating phases in each case is also briefly discussed. We conclude that future CE nu NS experiments with low-threshold capabilities can improve current TMM limits obtained from Borexino data.
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Agarwalla, S. K., Huber, P., Tang, J. A., & Winter, W. (2011). Optimization of the Neutrino Factory, revisited. J. High Energy Phys., 01(1), 120–45pp.
Abstract: We perform the baseline and energy optimization of the Neutrino Factory including the latest simulation results on the magnetized iron detector (MIND). We also consider the impact of tau decays, generated by v(mu) -> v(tau) or v(e) -> v(tau) appearance, on the mass hierarchy, CP violation, and theta(13) discovery reaches, which we find to be negligible for the considered detector. For the baseline-energy optimization for small sin(2) 2 theta(13), we qualitatively recover the results with earlier simulations of the MIND detector. We find optimal baselines of about 2 500km to 5 000km for the CP violation measurement, where now values of E-mu as low as about 12 GeV may be possible. However, for large sin(2) 2 theta(13), we demonstrate that the lower threshold and the backgrounds reconstructed at lower energies allow in fact for muon energies as low as 5 GeV at considerably shorter baselines, such as FNAL-Homestake. This implies that with the latest MIND analysis, low-and high-energy versions of the Neutrino Factory are just two different versions of the same experiment optimized for different parts of the parameter space. Apart from a green-field study of the updated detector performance, we discuss specific implementations for the two-baseline Neutrino Factory, where the considered detector sites are taken to be currently discussed underground laboratories. We find that reasonable setups can be found for the Neutrino Factory source in Asia, Europe, and North America, and that a triangular-shaped storage ring is possible in all cases based on geometrical arguments only.
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Coloma, P., Donini, A., Lopez-Pavon, J., & Minakata, H. (2011). Non-standard interactions at a neutrino factory: correlations and CP violation. J. High Energy Phys., 08(8), 036–41pp.
Abstract: We explore the potential of several Neutrino Factory (NF) setups to constrain, discover and measure new physics effects due to Non-Standard Interactions (NSI) in propagation through Earth matter. We first study the impact of NSI in the measurement of theta(13): we find that these could be large due to strong correlations of theta(13) with NSI parameters in the golden channel, and the inclusion of a detector at the magic baseline is crucial in order to reduce them as much as possible. We present, then, the sensitivity of the considered NF setups to the NSI parameters, paying special attention to correlations arising between them and the standard oscillation parameters, when all NSI parameters are introduced at once. Off-diagonal NSI parameters could be tested down to the level of 10(-3), whereas the diagonal combinations (epsilon(ee) – epsilon(tau tau)) and (epsilon(mu mu) – epsilon(tau tau)) can be tested down to 10(-1) and 10(-2), respectively. The possibilities of observing CP violation in this context are also explored, by presenting a first scan of the CP discovery potential of the NF setups to the phases phi(e mu), phi(e tau) and delta. We study separately the case where CP violation comes only from non-standard sources, and the case where it is entangled with the standard source, delta. In case delta turns out to be CP conserving, the interesting possibility of observing CP violation for reasonably small values of the NSI parameters emerges.
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Forero, D. V., Morisi, S., Tortola, M., & Valle, J. W. F. (2011). Lepton flavor violation and non-unitary lepton mixing in low-scale type-I seesaw. J. High Energy Phys., 09(9), 142–18pp.
Abstract: Within low-scale seesaw mechanisms, such as the inverse and linear seesaw, one expects (i) potentially large lepton flavor violation (LFV) and (ii) sizeable non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI). We consider the interplay between the magnitude of non-unitarity effects in the lepton mixing matrix, and the constraints that follow from LFV searches in the laboratory. We find that NSI parameters can be sizeable, up to percent level in some cases, while LFV rates, such as that for μ-> e gamma, lie within current limits, including the recent one set by the MEG collaboration. As a result the upcoming long baseline neutrino experiments offer a window of opportunity for complementary LFV and weak universality tests.
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Aparici, A., Herrero-Garcia, J., Rius, N., & Santamaria, A. (2012). On the nature of the fourth generation neutrino and its implications. J. High Energy Phys., 07(7), 030–31pp.
Abstract: We consider the neutrino sector of a Standard Model with four generations. While the three light neutrinos can obtain their masses from a variety of mechanisms with or without new neutral fermions, fourth-generation neutrinos need at least one new relatively light right-handed neutrino. If lepton number is not conserved this neutrino must have a Majorana mass term whose size depends on the underlying mechanism for lepton number violation. Majorana masses for the fourth-generation neutrinos induce relative large two-loop contributions to the light neutrino masses which could be even larger than the cosmological bounds. This sets strong limits on the mass parameters and mixings of the fourth-generation neutrinos.
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Bonnet, F., Hirsch, M., Ota, T., & Winter, W. (2012). Systematic study of the d=5 Weinberg operator at one-loop order. J. High Energy Phys., 07(7), 153–23pp.
Abstract: We perform a systematic study of the d = 5 Weinberg operator at the one-loop level. We identify three different categories of neutrino mass generation: (1) finite irreducible diagrams; (2) finite extensions of the usual seesaw mechanisms at one-loop and (3) divergent loop realizations of the seesaws. All radiative one-loop neutrino mass models must fall in to one of these classes. Case (1) gives the leading contribution to neutrino mass naturally and a classic example of this class is the Zee model. We demonstrate that in order to prevent that a tree level contribution dominates in case (2), Majorana fermions running in the loop and an additional Z(2) symmetry are needed for a genuinely leading one-loop contribution. In the type-II loop extensions, the Yukawa coupling will be generated at one loop, whereas the type-I/III extensions can be interpreted as loop-induced inverse or linear seesaw mechanisms. For the divergent diagrams in category (3), the tree level contribution cannot be avoided and is in fact needed as counter term to absorb the divergence.
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del Aguila, F., Aparici, A., Bhattacharya, S., Santamaria, A., & Wudka, J. (2012). Effective Lagrangian approach to neutrinoless double beta decay and neutrino masses. J. High Energy Phys., 06(6), 146–37pp.
Abstract: Neutrinoless double beta (0 nu beta beta) decay can in general produce electrons of either chirality, in contrast with the minimal Standard Model (SM) extension with only the addition of the Weinberg operator, which predicts two left-handed electrons in the final state. We classify the lepton number violating (LNV) effective operators with two leptons of either chirality but no quarks, ordered according to the magnitude of their contribution to 0 nu beta beta decay. We point out that, for each of the three chirality assignments, e(L)e(L), e(L)e(R) and e(R)e(R), there is only one LNV operator of the corresponding type to lowest order, and these have dimensions 5, 7 and 9, respectively. Neutrino masses are always induced by these extra operators but can be delayed to one or two loops, depending on the number of RH leptons entering in the operator. Then, the comparison of the 0 nu beta beta decay rate and neutrino masses should indicate the effective scenario at work, which confronted with the LHC searches should also eventually decide on the specific model elected by nature. We also list the SM additions generating these operators upon integration of the heavy modes, and discuss simple realistic examples of renormalizable theories for each case.
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