Abstract: When neutrino masses arise from the exchange of neutral heavy leptons, as in most seesaw schemes, the effective lepton mixing matrix N describing neutrino propagation is non-unitary, hence neutrinos are not exactly orthonormal. New CP violation phases appear in N that could be confused with the standard phase delta(CP) characterizing the three neutrino paradigm. We study the potential of the long-baseline neutrino experiment DUNE in probing CP violation induced by the standard CP phase in the presence of non-unitarity. In order to accomplish this we develop our previous formalism, so as to take into account the neutrino interactions with the medium, important in long baseline experiments such as DUNE. We find that the expected CP sensitivity of DUNE is somewhat degraded with respect to that characterizing the standard unitary case. However the effect is weaker than might have been expected thanks mainly to the wide neutrino beam. We also investigate the sensitivity of DUNE to the parameters characterizing non-unitarity. In this case we find that there is no improvement expected with respect to the current situation, unless the near detector setup is revamped.

Abstract: Despite being a well understood phenomenon in the context of current terrestrial experiments, neutrino flavor conversions in dense astrophysical environments probably represent one of the most challenging open problems in neutrino physics. Apart from being theoretically interesting, such a problem has several phenomenological implications in cosmology and in astrophysics, including the primordial nucleosynthesis of light elements abundance and other cosmological observables, nucleosynthesis of heavy nuclei, and the explosion of massive stars. In this review, we briefly summarize the state of the art on this topic, focusing on three environments: early Universe, core-collapse supernovae, and compact binary mergers.

Abstract: The framed standard model (FSM) is obtained from the standard model by incorporating, as field variables, the frame vectors (vielbeins) in internal symmetry space. It gives the standard Higgs boson and 3 generations of quarks and leptons as immediate consequences. It gives moreover a fermion mass matrix of the form: m = mT alpha alpha dagger, where alpha is a vector in generation space independent of the fermion species and rotating with changing scale, which has already been shown to lead, generically, to up-down mixing, neutrino oscillations and mass hierarchy. In this paper, pushing the FSM further, one first derives to 1-loop order the RGE for the rotation of alpha, and then applies it to fit mass and mixing data as a first test of the model. With 7 real adjustable parameters, 18 measured quantities are fitted, most (12) to within experimental error or to better than 0.5 percent, and the rest (6) not far off. (A summary of this fit can be found in Table 2 of this paper.) Two notable features, both generic to FSM, not just specific to the fit, are: (i) that a theta-angle of order unity in the instanton term in QCD would translate via rotation into a Kobayashi-Maskawa phase in the CKM matrix of about the observed magnitude (J similar to 10(-5)), (ii) that it would come out correctly that m(u) < m(d), despite the fact that m(t) >> m(b), m(c) >> m(s). Of the 18 quantities fitted, 12 are deemed independent in the usual formulation of the standard model. In fact, the fit gives a total of 17 independent parameters of the standard model, but 5 of these have not been measured by experiment.