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.

Abstract: We present a detailed description of the electromagnetic filter for the PTOLEMY project to directly detect the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB). Starting with an initial estimate for the orbital magnetic moment, the higher-order drift process of E x B is configured to balance the gradient-B drift motion of the electron in such a way as to guide the trajectory into the standing voltage potential along the mid-plane of the filter. As a function of drift distance along the length of the filter, the filter zooms in with exponentially increasing precision on the transverse velocity component of the electron kinetic energy. This yields a linear dimension for the total filter length that is exceptionally compact compared to previous techniques for electromagnetic filtering. The parallel velocity component of the electron kinetic energy oscillates in an electrostatic harmonic trap as the electron drifts along the length of the filter. An analysis of the phase-space volume conservation validates the expected behavior of the filter from the adiabatic invariance of the orbital magnetic moment and energy conservation following Liouville's theorem for Hamiltonian systems. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract: We describe the main features of a new and updated version of the program PArthENoPE, which computes the abundances of light elements produced during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. As the previous first release in 2008, the new one, PArthENoPE2.0, is publicly available and distributed from the code site, http://parthenope.na.infn.it . Apart from minor changes, which will be also detailed, the main improvements are as follows. The powerful, but not freely accessible, NAG routines have been substituted by ODEPACK libraries, without any significant loss in precision. Moreover, we have developed a Graphical User Interface (GUI) which allows a friendly use of the code and a simpler implementation of running for grids of input parameters. New Version program summary Program Title: PArthENoPE2.0 Program Files doi : http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/wvgr7d8yt9.1 Licensing provisions: GPLv3 Programming language: Fortran 77 and Python Supplementary material: User Manual available on the web page http://parthenope.na.infn.it Journal reference of previous version: Comput. Phys. Commun. 178 (2008) 956 971 Does the new version supersede the previous version?: Yes Reasons for the new version: Make the code more versatile and user friendly Summary of revisions: (1) Publicly available libraries (2) GUI for configuration Nature of problem: Computation of yields of light elements synthesized in the primordial universe Solution method: Livermore Solver for Ordinary Differential Equations (LSODE) for stiff and nonstiff systems