Adey, D. et al, Cervera-Villanueva, A., Donini, A., Ghosh, T., Gomez-Cadenas, J. J., Hernandez, P., et al. (2014). Light sterile neutrino sensitivity at the nuSTORM facility. Phys. Rev. D, 89(7), 071301–7pp.
Abstract: A facility that can deliver beams of electron and muon neutrinos from the decay of a stored muon beam has the potential to unambiguously resolve the issue of the evidence for light sterile neutrinos that arises in short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments and from estimates of the effective number of neutrino flavors from fits to cosmological data. In this paper, we show that the nuSTORM facility, with stored muons of 3.8 GeV/c +/- 10%, will be able to carry out a conclusive muon neutrino appearance search for sterile neutrinos and test the LSND and MiniBooNE experimental signals with 10 sigma sensitivity, even assuming conservative estimates for the systematic uncertainties. This experiment would add greatly to our knowledge of the contribution of light sterile neutrinos to the number of effective neutrino flavors from the abundance of primordial helium production and from constraints on neutrino energy density from the cosmic microwave background. The appearance search is complemented by a simultaneous muon neutrino disappearance analysis that will facilitate tests of various sterile neutrino models.
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Agarwalla, S. K., & Hernandez, P. (2012). Probing the neutrino mass hierarchy with Super-Kamiokande. J. High Energy Phys., 10(10), 086–14pp.
Abstract: We show that for recently discovered large values of theta(13), a superbeam with an average neutrino energy of similar to 5 GeV, such as those being proposed at CERN, if pointing to Super-Kamiokande (L similar or equal to 8770 km), could reveal the neutrino mass hierarchy at 5 sigma in less than two years irrespective of the true hierarchy and CP phase. The measurement relies on the near resonant matter effect in the nu(mu) -> nu(e) oscillation channel, and can be done counting the total number of appearance events with just a neutrino beam.
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Agrawal, P. et al, Hernandez, P., & Lopez-Pavon, J. (2021). Feebly-interacting particles: FIPs 2020 workshop report. Eur. Phys. J. C, 81(11), 1015–137pp.
Abstract: With the establishment and maturation of the experimental programs searching for new physics with sizeable couplings at the LHC, there is an increasing interest in the broader particle and astrophysics community for exploring the physics of light and feebly-interacting particles as a paradigm complementary to a New Physics sector at the TeV scale and beyond. FIPs 2020 has been the first workshop fully dedicated to the physics of feebly-interacting particles and was held virtually from 31 August to 4 September 2020. The workshop has gathered together experts from collider, beam dump, fixed target experiments, as well as from astrophysics, axions/ALPs searches, current/future neutrino experiments, and dark matter direct detection communities to discuss progress in experimental searches and underlying theory models for FIPs physics, and to enhance the cross-fertilisation across different fields. FIPs 2020 has been complemented by the topical workshop “Physics Beyond Colliders meets theory”, held at CERN from 7 June to 9 June 2020. This document presents the summary of the talks presented at the workshops and the outcome of the subsequent discussions held immediately after. It aims to provide a clear picture of this blooming field and proposes a few recommendations for the next round of experimental results.
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Albandea, D., Del Debbio, L., Hernandez, P., Kenway, R., Marsh Rossney, J., & Ramos, A. (2023). Learning trivializing flows. Eur. Phys. J. C, 83(7), 676–14pp.
Abstract: The recent introduction of machine learning techniques, especially normalizing flows, for the sampling of lattice gauge theories has shed some hope on improving the sampling efficiency of the traditional hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm. In this work we study a modified HMC algorithm that draws on the seminal work on trivializing flows by L & uuml;scher. Autocorrelations are reduced by sampling from a simpler action that is related to the original action by an invertible mapping realised through Normalizing Flows models with a minimal set of training parameters. We test the algorithm in a f(4) theory in 2D where we observe reduced autocorrelation times compared with HMC, and demonstrate that the training can be done at small unphysical volumes and used in physical conditions. We also study the scaling of the algorithm towards the continuum limit under various assumptions on the network architecture.
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Albandea, D., Hernandez, P., Ramos, A., & Romero-Lopez, F. (2021). Topological sampling through windings. Eur. Phys. J. C, 81(10), 873–12pp.
Abstract: We propose a modification of the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm that overcomes the topological freezing of a two-dimensional U(1) gauge theory with and without fermion content. This algorithm includes reversible jumps between topological sectors – winding steps – combined with standard HMC steps. The full algorithm is referred to as winding HMC (wHMC), and it shows an improved behaviour of the autocorrelation time towards the continuum limit. We find excellent agreement between the wHMC estimates of the plaquette and topological susceptibility and the analytical predictions in the U(1) pure gauge theory, which are known even at finite beta. We also study the expectation values in fixed topological sectors using both HMC and wHMC, with and without fermions. Even when topology is frozen in HMC – leading to significant deviations in topological as well as non-topological quantities – the two algorithms agree on the fixed-topology averages. Finally, we briefly compare the wHMC algorithm results to those obtained with master-field simulations of size L similar to 8 x 10(3).
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