Abstract: The extraction of the neutrino mass ordering is one of the major challenges in particle physics and cosmology, not only for its implications for a fundamental theory of mass generation in nature, but also for its decisive role in the scale of future neutrinoless double beta decay experimental searches. It has been recently claimed that current oscillation, beta decay and cosmological limits on the different observables describing the neutrino mass parameter space provide robust decisive Bayesian evidence in favor of the normal ordering of the neutrino mass spectrum [1]. We further investigate these strong claims using a rich and wide phenomenology, with different sampling techniques of the neutrino parameter space. Contrary to the findings of Jimenez et al. [1], no decisive evidence for the normal mass ordering is found. Neutrino mass ordering analyses must rely on priors and parameterizations that are ordering-agnostic: robust results should be regarded as those in which the preference for the normal neutrino mass ordering is driven exclusively by the data, while we find a difference of up to a factor of 33 in the Bayes factors among the different priors and parameterizations exploited here. An ordering-agnostic prior would be represented by the case of parameterizations sampling over the two mass splittings and a mass scale, or those sampling over the individual neutrino masses via normal prior distributions only. In this regard, we show that the current significance in favor of the normal mass ordering should be taken as 2.7 sigma (i.e. moderate evidence), mostly driven by neutrino oscillation data. Let us stress that, while current data favor NO only mildly, we do not exclude the possibility that this may change in the future. Eventually, upcoming oscillation and cosmological data may (or may not) lead to a more significant exclusion of IO.

Abstract: Non-unitary neutrino mixing implies an extra CP violating phase that can fake the leptonic Dirac CP phase delta(CP) of the simplest three-neutrino mixing benchmark scheme. This would hinder the possibility of probing for CP violation in accelerator-type experiments. We take T2K and T2HK as examples to demonstrate the degeneracy between the “standard” (or “unitary”) and “nonunitary” CP phases. We find, under the assumption of nonunitary mixing, that their CP sensitivities severely deteriorate. Fortunately, the TNT2K proposal of supplementing T2(H)K with a μDAR source for better measurement of delta(CP) can partially break the CP degeneracy by probing both cos delta(CP) and sin delta(CP) dependences in the wide spectrum of the μDAR flux. We also show that the further addition of a near detector to the μDAR setup can eliminate the degeneracy completely.

Abstract: Majorana neutrino electromagnetic properties are studied through neutral current coherent neutrinonucleus scattering. We focus on the potential of the recently planned COHERENT experiment at the Spallation Neutron Source to probe muon-neutrino magnetic moments. The resulting sensitivities are determined on the basis of chi(2) analysis employing realistic nuclear structure calculations in the context of the quasiparticle random phase approximation. We find that they can improve existing limits by half an order of magnitude. In addition, we show that these facilities allow for standard model precision tests in the low energy regime, with a competitive determination of the weak mixing angle. Finally, they also offer the capability to probe other electromagnetic neutrino properties, such as the neutrino charge radius. We illustrate our results for various choices of experimental setup and target material.