We study the detection prospects of relatively light charged scalars in radiative Majorana neutrino mass models, such as the Zee model and its variants using scalar leptoquarks, at current and future neutrino telescopes. In particular, we show that these scalar mediators can give rise to Glashow-like resonance features in the ultra-high energy neutrino (UHE) event spectrum at the IceCube neutrino observatory and its high-energy upgrade IceCube-Gen2. The same scalars can also give rise to observable non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI), and we show that the UHE neutrinos provide a complementary probe of NSI. We also discuss an interesting possibility of producing such resonances by incoming sterile neutrino components in the case where neutrinos are pseudo-Dirac particles.
The IceCube collaboration has recently announced the discovery of ultra-high energy neutrino events. These neutrinos can be used to probe their production source, as well as leptonic mixing parameters. In this work, we have used the first IceCube data to constrain the leptonic CP violating phase $δ_{cp}$. For this, we have analyzed the data in the form of flux ratios. We find that the fit to $δ_{cp}$ depends on the assumptions made on the production mechanism of these astrophyscial neutrinos. Consequently, we also use this data to impose constraints on the sources of the neutrinos.
Medium baseline reactor experiments (Double Chooz, Daya Bay and RENO) provide a unique opportunity to test the presence of light sterile neutrinos. We analyze the data of these experiments in the search of sterile neutrinos and also test the robustness of theta_13 determination in the presence of sterile neutrinos. We show that existence of a light sterile neutrino state improves the fit to these data moderately. We also show that the measured value of theta_{13} by these experiments is reliable even in the presence of sterile neutrinos, and the reliability owes significantly to the Daya Bay a…
Times of arrival of high energy neutrinos encode information about their sources. We demonstrate that the energy-dependence of the onset time of neutrino emission in advancing relativistic jets can be used to extract important information about the supernova/gamma-ray burst progenitor structure. We examine this energy and time dependence for different supernova and gamma-ray burst progenitors, including red and blue supergiants, helium cores, Wolf-Rayet stars, and chemically homogeneous stars, with a variety of masses and metallicities. For choked jets, we calculate the cutoff of observable ne…
We consider a model where sterile neutrinos can propagate in a large compactified extra dimension (a) giving rise to Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes and the Standard Model left-handed neutrinos are confined to a 4-dimensional spacetime brane. The KK modes mix with the standard neutrinos modifying their oscillation pattern. We examine current experiments in this framework obtaining stringent limits on a.
We discuss the possibility to distinguish between Dirac and Majorana neutrinos in the context of the minimal gauge theory for neutrino masses, the B-L gauge extension of the Standard Model. We revisit the possibility to observe lepton number violation at the Large Hadron Collider and point out the importance of the decays of the new gauge boson to discriminate between the existence of Dirac or Majorana neutrinos.
If neutrinos get mass via the seesaw mechanism the mixing matrix describing neutrino oscillations can be effectively non-unitary. We show that in this case the neutrino appearance probabilities involve a new CP phase, phi, associated to non-unitarity. This leads to an ambiguity in extracting the "standard" three--neutrino phase delta_CP, which can survive even after neutrino and antineutrino channels are combined. Its existence should be taken into account in the planning of any oscillation experiment aiming at a robust measurement of delta_CP.
One phenomenological explanation of superluminal propagation of neutrinos, which may have been observed by OPERA and MINOS, is that neutrinos travel faster inside of matter than in vacuum. If so neutrinos exhibit refraction inside matter and should exhibit other manifestations of refraction, such as deflection and reflection. Such refraction would be easily detectable through the momentum imparted to appropriately shaped refractive material inserted into the neutrino beam. For NuMI this could be as large as ~10g cm/s. If these effect were found, they would provide new ways of manipulating and …
The oscillation of neutrino flavors, due to its interferometry nature, is extremely sensitive to the phase differences developing during the propagation of neutrinos. In this paper we investigate the effect of the Violation of Equivalence Principle (VEP) on the flavor oscillation probabilities of atmospheric and cosmic neutrinos observed at neutrino telescopes such as IceCube. Assuming a general parameterization of VEP, dubbed extended parameter space, we show that the synergy between the collected data of high energy atmospheric and cosmic neutrinos severely constrains the VEP parameters. Als…
We argue that the COMET experiment --- a dedicated experiment for the $μ$-$e$ conversion search --- can be a powerful facility to search for heavy neutrinos in the mass range $1\,{\rm MeV} \lesssim M \lesssim 100\,{\rm MeV}$. The stopped muons captured by the target nuclei or decaying in orbit are efficiently produce heavy neutrinos via the active-sterile mixing. The produced heavy neutrinos then decay to electron-positron pair (plus an active neutrino), which events are clearly seen by the cylindrical drift chamber surrounding the target. The expected sensitivity is comparable to the PS191 bo…
Observation of ultra-high energy astrophysical neutrinos and identification of their flavors have been proposed for future neutrino telescopes. The flavor ratio of astrophysical neutrinos observed on the Earth depends on both the initial flavor ratio at the source and flavor transitions taking place during propagations of these neutrinos. The flavor transition mechanisms are well-classified with our model-independent parametrization. We find a new parameter R=ϕ_e/(ϕ_μ + ϕ_τ) can probe directly the flavor transition in the framework of our model-independent parametrization, without the assumpti…
We show that existing laboratory experiments have the potential to unveil the origin of matter by probing leptogenesis in the type-I seesaw model with three right-handed neutrinos and Majorana masses in the GeV range. The baryon asymmetry is generated by CP-violating flavour oscillations during the production of the right-handed neutrinos. In contrast to the case with only two right-handed neutrinos, no degeneracy in the Majorana masses is required. The right-handed neutrinos can be found in meson decays at BELLE II and LHCb.
Large neutrino event numbers in future experiments measuring coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering allow precision measurements of standard and new physics. We analyze the current and prospective limits of a light scalar particle coupling to neutrinos and quarks, using COHERENT and CONUS as examples. Both lepton number conserving and violating interactions are considered. It is shown that current (future) experiments can probe for scalar masses of a few MeV couplings down to the level of $10^{-4}$ $(10^{-6})$. Scalars with masses around the neutrino energy allow to determine their mass …
We analyze the prospects for testing the cosmic neutrino background and its interpretation as source of Neutrino Dark Energy with the radio telescope LOFAR.
Non-standard neutrino interactions with a massive boson can produce the bosons in the core of core-collapse supernovae (SNe). After the emission of the bosons from the SN core, their subsequent decays into neutrinos can modify the SN neutrino flux. We show future observations of neutrinos from a next galactic SN in Super-Kamiokande (SK) and Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) can probe flavor-universal non-standard neutrino couplings to a light boson, improving the previous limit from the SN 1987A neutrino burst by several orders of magnitude. We also discuss sensitivity of the flavor-universal non-standard…
If ultra-light dark matter (ULDM) exists and couples to neutrinos, it can be discovered via time-periodic variations in the neutrino mass and mixing parameters. We analyze the current bounds on such a scenario and establish the sensitivity expected for both time-averaged and time-resolved modulations in future neutrino oscillation experiments. We place a special emphasis in our analysis on time modulations of the CP violating mixing phase. We illustrate with a toy model the case where the leading modulation effect can be CP violating while the effect on CP conserving parameters is suppressed. …
We present the prospects of ORCA searches for new physics phenomena using atmospheric neutrinos. Focus is given to exploiting the impact of strong matter effects on the oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos in light of expanded models, such as sterile neutrinos and non-standard interactions. In the presence of light sterile neutrinos that mix with active neutrinos, additional resonances and suppressions may occur at different energies. One may also use neutrino oscillations to probe the properties of the coherent forward scattering which may be altered by new interactions beyond the Standard Mo…
The next generation of radio telescopes will be sensitive to low-scale quantum gravity by measuring ultra-high-energy neutrinos. In this letter, we demonstrate for the first time that neutrino-nucleon soft interactions induced by TeV-scale gravity would significantly increase the number of events detected by the IceCube-Gen2 radio array in the EeV regime. However, we show that these experiments cannot measure the total cross section using only the angular and energy information of the neutrino flux, unless assumptions on the underlying inelasticity distribution of neutral interactions are made…
The flavor of cosmic neutrinos may help unveil their sources and could reveal the presence of new physics in the neutrino sector. We consider the impacts of next-generation neutrino detectors, including the planned upgrade to neutrino detector--IceCube-Gen2, which is well-positioned to make dramatic improvements in both flavor and spectral measurements. We show that various models in neutrino physics beyond the Standard Model, such as neutrino decay, pseudo-Dirac states, and neutrino self-scattering, may be found or strongly constrained at IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT. We find that the additional f…
The Forward Physics Facility (FPF), planned to operate near the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC, offers exciting new terrain to explore neutrino properties at TeV energy scales. It will reach an unprecedented regime for terrestrial neutrino experiments and provide the opportunity to reveal new physics of neutrinos at higher energy scales. We demonstrate that future detectors at the FPF have the potential to discover new mediators that couple predominantly to neutrinos, with masses between 0.3 and 20 GeV and small couplings not yet probed by existing searches. Such a neutrinophilic mediator …
We show that for recently discovered large values of theta(13), a superbeam with an average neutrino energy of ~ 5 GeV, such as those being proposed at CERN, if pointing to Super-Kamiokande (L = 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 numu to nue oscillation channel, and can be done counting the total number of appearance events with just a neutrino beam.
Neutrinoless double beta decay (NDBD) is the only experiment that could probe the Majorana nature of the neutrino. Here we study the theoretical implications of NDBD for models yielding tri-bimaximal lepton mixing like A4 and S4.
The neutrino mass hierarchy is one of the neutrino fundamental properties yet to be determined. We introduce a method to determine neutrino mass hierarchy by comparing the interaction rate of neutral current (NC) interactions, $ν(\hatν) + p\rightarrowν(\hatν) + p$, and inverse beta decays (IBD), $\barν_e + p\rightarrow n + e^+$, of supernova neutrinos in scintillation detectors. Neutrino flavor conversions inside the supernova are sensitive to neutrino mass hierarchy. Due to Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effects, the full swapping of $\barν_e$ flux with the $\barν_x$ ($x=μ,~τ$) one occurs in th…
In this paper we study the physics potential of the KamLAND detector in probing neutrino oscillation parameters through observation of supernova neutrinos. In particular, we discuss the possibilities of probing the mixing angle $θ_{13}$ and determining the sign of $Δm^2_{32}$ from the total charged current(CC) event rates on the proton and $^{12}{C}$ target, as well as from the CC spectra. We discuss the chances of probing the earth matter effect induced modulations from the observation of CC spectra in the different CC reactions in KamLAND and find the volume required to get a statistically s…
Neutrino-electron scattering can be used to probe neutrino electromagnetic properties at low-threshold underground detectors with good angular and recoil electron energy resolution. We propose to do this using a number of artificial neutrino and anti-neutrino sources such as $^{51}Cr_{24}$ and $^{90}Sr-Y$. The neutrino flux is known to within one percent, in contrast to the reactor case and one can reach lower neutrino energies. For the $^{90}Sr-Y$ source we estimate that the signal expected for a neutrino magnetic moment of $μ_ν=6 \times 10^{-11}μ_{B}$ will be comparable to that expected in t…
Do neutrinos have sizable self-interactions? They might. Laboratory constraints are weak, so strong effects are possible in astrophysical environments and the early universe. Observations with neutrino telescopes can provide an independent probe of neutrino self ("secret") interactions, as the sources are distant and the cosmic neutrino background intervenes. We define a roadmap for making decisive progress on testing secret neutrino interactions governed by a light mediator. This progress will be enabled by IceCube-Gen2 observations of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. Critical to this is …
We explore how well reactor antineutrino experiments can constrain or measure the loss of quantum coherence in neutrino oscillations. We assume that decoherence effects are encoded in the size of the neutrino wave-packet, $σ$. We find that the current experiments Daya Bay and the Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillation (RENO) already constrain $σ>1.0\times 10^{-4}$ nm and estimate that future data from the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) would be sensitive to $σ<2.1\times 10^{-3}$ nm. If the effects of loss of coherence are within the sensitivity of JUNO, we expect $σ$ to …
While three flavors of "active" neutrinos are consistent with mixing angle results within error bars, there are anomalies may be hints of physics beyond the standard model that can accommodate a fourth mostly "sterile" neutrino species with an eV-scale mass and a mixing angle with active neutrinos of order $θ_0\simeq 0.1$. We describe a scenario with eV-scale sterile neutrinos that have self-interactions via a new gauge vector boson, a "secret" mediator $ϕ$. We show that their production in the early Universe via mixing with active neutrinos is consistent with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and free…
Future galactic supernovae will provide an extremely long baseline for studying the properties and interactions of neutrinos. In this paper, we discuss the possibility of using such an event to constrain (or discover) the effects of exotic physics in scenarios that are not currently constrained and are not accessible with reactor or solar neutrino experiments. In particular, we focus on the cases of neutrino decay and quantum decoherence. We calculate the expected signal from a core-collapse supernova in both current and future water Cerenkov, scintillating, and liquid argon detectors, and fin…
Non-Abelian discrete symmetries provide an interesting opportunity to address the flavor puzzle in the lepton sector. However, the number of currently viable models based on such symmetries is rather large. High-precision measurements of the leptonic mixing parameters by future neutrino experiments, including ESSnuSB, T2HK, DUNE, and JUNO, will be crucial to test such models. We show that the complementarity among these experiments offers a powerful tool for narrowing down this broad class of lepton flavor models.
We review the prospects for probing new physics with neutrino astrophysics. High energy neutrinos provide an important means of accessing physics beyond the electroweak scale. Neutrinos have a number of advantages over conventional astronomy and, in particular, carry information encoded in their flavor degree of freedom which could reveal a variety of exotic neutrino properties. We also outline ways in which neutrino astrophysics can be used to constrain dark matter properties, and explain how neutrino-based limits lead to a strong general bound on the dark matter total annihilation cross-sect…
New limits on the weak mixing angle and on the electron neutrino effective charge radius in the low energy regime, below 100 MeV, are obtained from a combined fit of all electron-(anti)neutrino electron elastic scattering measurements. We have included the recent TEXONO measurement with a CsI (Tl) detector. Only statistical error of this measurement has been taken into account. Weak mixing angle is found to be sin^2 theta_W = 0.255 +0.022 -0.023. The electron neutrino effective charge radius squared is bounded to be r^2 = (0.9 +0.9 -1.0) x 10^{-32} cm^2. The sensitivity of future low energy ne…
A short review of form factors, parton distribution functions and generalized parton distributions is given. A possible application of generalized parton distributions in the weak sector is discussed.
We show that in TeV-scale left-right (L-R) symmetric seesaw models, there are new dominant contributions to the collider signals of heavy Majorana neutrinos arising from the heavy-light neutrino mixing, which directly probe the seesaw matrix in a certain class of models. We propose a way to distinguish this contribution from the widely discussed one that only probes the Majorana nature of the heavy right-handed neutrinos, by analyzing some simple kinematical variables. We find that in this class of L-R seesaw models the existing LHC data already yield slightly stronger constraints on the heavy…
The possibility to verify the pseudo-Dirac nature of neutrinos is investigated here via the detection of ultra high energy neutrinos from distant cosmological objects like GRBs. The very long baseline and the energy range from $\sim$ TeV to $\sim$ EeV for such neutrinos invokes the likelihood to probe very small pseude-Dirac splittings. The expected secondary muons from such neutrinos that can be detected by a kilometer scale detector such as ICECUBE is calculated. The pseudo-Dirac nature, if exists, will show a considerable departure from flavour oscillation scenario in the total yield of the…
We have studied $CPT$ violation in neutrino oscillation considering three flavor framework with matter effect. We have constructed a new way to find the oscillation probability incorporating $CPT$ violating terms without any approximation. Then $CPT$ violation with atmospheric neutrinos for a magnetized iron calorimeter detector considering the muons (directly measurable with high resolution) of the charge current events has been studied for zero and nonzero $θ_{13}$ values. It is found that a potential bound of $δb_{32} \lapp 6\times 10^{-24}$ GeV at 99% CL can be obtained with 1 Mton.year ex…
We review the current status of the neutrino mass and mixing parameters needed to reconstruct the neutrino mass matrix. A comparative study of the precision in the measurement of oscillation parameters expected from the next generation solar, atmospheric, reactor and accelerator based experiments is presented. We discuss the potential of $0νββ$ experiments in determining the neutrino mass hierarchy and the importance of a better $θ_{12}$ measurement for it.
Low energy neutrino processes are ideal probes for new Physics beyond the Standard Model. Cosmological observations and rare nuclear processes can test neutrino mass scales and give definite answers to unsolved basic questions like the Majorana/Dirac nature of the neutrino.
We show in this paper that the observation of the angular distribution of upward-going muons and cascade events induced by atmospheric neutrinos at the TeV energy scale, which can be performed by a kilometer-scale neutrino telescope, such as the IceCube detector, can be used to probe a large neutrino mass splitting, $| Δm^2 | \sim (0.5-2.0)$ eV$^2$, implied by the LSND experiment and discriminate among four neutrino mass schemes. This is due to the fact that such a large mass scale can promote non negligible muon neutrino to electron/tau neutrino (and/or anti-muon neutrino to anti-electron/ant…
The Kamioka-Korea two detector system is a powerful experimental setup for resolving neutrino parameter degeneracies and probing CP violation in neutrino oscillation. In this paper, we study sensitivities of this same setup to several nonstandard neutrino physics such as quantum decoherence, tiny violation of Lorentz symmetry, and nonstandard interactions of neutrinos with matter. In most cases, the Kamioka-Korea two-detector setup is more sensitive than the one-detector setup, except for the Lorentz symmetry violation with CPT violation, and the nonstandard neutrino interactions with matter. …
Sterile neutrinos with mass in the eV-scale and large mixings of order $θ_0\simeq 0.1$ could explain some anomalies found in short-baseline neutrino oscillation data. Here, we revisit a neutrino portal scenario in which eV-scale sterile neutrinos have self-interactions via a new gauge vector boson $ϕ$. Their production in the early Universe via mixing with active neutrinos can be suppressed by the induced effective potential in the sterile sector. We study how different cosmological observations can constrain this model, in terms of the mass of the new gauge boson, $M_ϕ$, and its coupling to s…
We investigate the impact of a fourth sterile neutrino at reactor and Spallation Neutron Source neutrino detectors. Specifically, we explore the discovery potential of the TEXONO and COHERENT experiments to subleading sterile neutrino effects through the measurement of the coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering event rate. Our dedicated $χ^2$-sensitivity analysis employs realistic nuclear structure calculations adequate for high purity sub-keV threshold Germanium detectors.
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 $δ_{\text{CP}}$ 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…
The Leggett-Garg inequality (LGI) as a temporal analogue of Bell's inequality, derived using the notion of realism, is applied in a hitherto unexplored context involving the weak interaction induced two-state oscillations of decaying neutral kaons and neutrinos. The maximum violation of LGI obtained from the quantum mechanical results is significantly higher for the oscillating neutrinos compared to that for the kaons. Interestingly, the effect of CP non-invariance for the kaon oscillation is to enhance this violation while, for neutrinos, it is sensitive to the value of the mixing parameter.
We discuss how the intensity and the energy frontiers provide complementary constraints within a minimal model of neutrino mass involving just one new field beyond the Standard Model at accessible energy, namely a doubly charged scalar $S^{++}$ and its antiparticle $S^{--}$. In particular we focus on the complementarity between high-energy LHC searches and low-energy probes such as lepton flavor violation. Our setting is a prime example of how high- and low-energy physics can cross-fertilize each other.
Motivated by the first observation of coherent-elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering at the COHERENT experiment, we confront the neutrino dipole portal giving rise to the transition of the standard model neutrinos to sterile neutrinos with the recently released CENNS 10 data from the liquid argon as well as the CsI data of the COHERENT experiment. Performing statistical analysis of those data, we show how the transition magnetic moment can be constrained for the range of the sterile neutrino mass between 10 keV and 40 MeV.
Ever since the Majorana classic work, the nature of neutrino has been one of the central questions of the weak interaction physics. If neutrino is its own antiparticle, the immediate consequence is lepton number violation through the neutrinoless double beta decay. However, colliders such as the LHC offer a hope of seeing directly the same phenomenon, and moreover the Majorana nature of new particles needed to complete the Standard Model. I review here the salient features of these phenomena, and then turn to grand unification as a way of probing the scale of the relevant new physics. The mini…
We explore the effects of nonstandard neutrino interactions in the lower components of the solar neutrino spectrum which are predominant by the vacuum oscillations. The recent measurements of Borexino experiment between 2011 and 2015 provide a clean test to study the nonstandard neutrino interactions at the source (sun) and the at solar detector. In this work, first the possible standard model parameters are estimated from the combined data of the low energy regime and then the nonstandard effects at the source, at the detector, and from the interplay between source and detector parameters are…
Observation of lepton number ($L$) violation by two units at colliders would provide evidence for the Majorana nature of neutrinos. We study signals of $L$-violation in the context of two popular models of neutrino masses, the type-II seesaw model and the Zee model, wherein small neutrino masses arise at the tree-level and one-loop level, respectively. We focus on $L$-violation signals at the LHC arising through the process $pp \to \ell^{\pm}\ell^{\prime \pm}$ + jets within these frameworks. We obtain sensitivity to $L$-violation in the type-II seesaw model for triplet scalar masses up to 700 …
We consider a four flavour scenario for the neutrinos where an extra sterile neutrino is introduced with the three families of active neutrinos and study the deviation from three flavour scenario in the ultra high energy (UHE) regime. We calculate the possible muon and shower yields at a 1 Km$^2$ detector such as ICECUBE for these neutrinos from distant UHE sources namely Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) etc. Similar estimations for muon and shower yields are also obtained for three flavour case. Comparing the two results we find considerable differences of the yields for these two cases. This can be u…
We discuss the possibility of constraining or discovering the non-standard neutrino physics beyond the standard model with future long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. Among very many possible experimental set up we discuss neutrino factory and T2KK, in which two detector setting may be useful to achieve the goal. In particular, neutrino factory with two detectors at baselines of 3000 km and 7000 km have a great sensitivity to non-standard interaction (NSI) and solve the $θ_{13}$-NSI confusion problem.
Motivated by a pilot experiment conducted by F.Vannucci et al. during a solar eclipse, we work out the geometry governing the radiative decays of solar neutrinos. Surprisingly, although a smaller proportion of the photons can be detected, the case of strongly non-degenerate neutrinos brings better limits in terms of the fundamental couplings. We advocate satellite-based experiments to improve the sensitivity.
A bilinear R-Parity breaking SUSY model for neutrino mass and mixing predicts the lightest superparticle to decay mainly into a pair of tau leptons or b quarks along with a neutrino for relatively light SUSY spectra. This leads to a distinctive triple bang signature of SUSY events at ultrahigh energy neutrino telescopes like IceCube or Antares. While the expected signal size is only marginal at IceCube, it will be promising for a future multi-km^3 size neutrino telescope.
Sterile neutrino conversion in meter scale baselines can be sensitively probed using monoenergetic, sub-MeV, flavor pure e-neutrinos from an artificial MCi source and the unique technology of LENS designed to oberve the low energy solar neutrino spectrum via tagged CC e-neutrino capture in 115-In. Active-sterile oscillations can be directly observed in the granular LENS detector itself to critically test and extend resuls of short baseline accelerator and reactor experiments.
