Search results for "RADIOACTIVITY"
showing 10 items of 334 documents
The Z boson spin observables as messengers of new physics
2017
We demonstrate that the 8 multipole parameters describing the spin state of the $Z$ boson are able to disentangle known $Z$ production mechanisms and signals from new physics at the LHC. They can be extracted from appropriate asymmetries in the angular distribution of lepton pairs from the $Z$ boson decay. The power of this analysis is illustrated by (i) the production of $Z$ boson plus jets; (ii) $Z$ boson plus missing transverse energy; (iii) $W$ and $Z$ bosons originating from the two-body decay of a heavy resonance.
GeV-scale neutrinos: interactions with mesons and DUNE sensitivity
2021
The simplest extension of the SM to account for the observed neutrino masses and mixings is the addition of at least two singlet fermions (or right-handed neutrinos). If their masses lie at or below the GeV scale, such new fermions would be produced in meson decays. Similarly, provided they are sufficiently heavy, their decay channels may involve mesons in the final state. Although the couplings between mesons and heavy neutrinos have been computed previously, significant discrepancies can be found in the literature. The aim of this paper is to clarify such discrepancies and provide consistent expressions for all relevant effective operators involving mesons with masses up to 2 GeV. Moreove…
The ultraviolet landscape of two-Higgs doublet models
2018
We study the predictions of generic ultraviolet completions of two-Higgs doublet models. We assume that at the matching scale between the two-Higgs doublet model and a ultraviolet complete theory -- which can be anywhere between the TeV and the Planck scale -- arbitrary but perturbative values for the quartic couplings are present. We evaluate the couplings down from the matching scale to the weak scale and study the predictions for the scalar mass spectrum. In particular, we show the importance of radiative corrections which are essential for both an accurate Higgs mass calculation as well as determining the stability of the electroweak vacuum. We study the relation between the mass splitt…
Majorana vs pseudo-Dirac neutrinos at the ILC
2019
Neutrino masses could originate in seesaw models testable at colliders, with light mediators and an approximate lepton number symmetry. The minimal model of this type contains two quasi-degenerate Majorana fermions forming a pseudo-Dirac pair. An important question is to what extent future colliders will have sensitivity to the splitting between the Majorana components, since this quantity signals the breaking of lepton number and is connected to the light neutrino masses. We consider the production of these neutral heavy leptons at the ILC, where their displaced decays provide a golden signal: a forward–backward charge asymmetry, which depends crucially on the mass splitting between the tw…
Spontaneous baryogenesis in spiral inflation
2019
We examined the possibility of spontaneous baryogenesis driven by the inflaton in the scenario of spiral inflation, and found the parametric dependence of the late-time baryon number asymmetry. As a result, it is shown that, depending on the effective coupling of baryon/lepton number violating operators, it is possible to obtain the right amount of asymmetry even in the presence of a matter-domination era as long as such era is relatively short. In a part of the parameter space, the required expansion rate during inflation is close to the current upper-bound, and hence can be probed in the near future experiments.
Cosmology and CPT violating neutrinos
2017
The combination Charge Conjugation-Parity-Time Reversal(CPT) is a fundamental symmetry in our current understanding of nature. As such, testing CPT violation is a strongly motivated path to explore new physics. In this paper we study CPT violation in the neutrino sector, giving for the first time a bound, for a fundamental particle, in the CPT violating particle-antiparticle gravitational mass difference. We argue that cosmology is nowadays the only data sensitive to CPT violation for the neutrino-antineutrino mass splitting and we use the latest data release from Planck combined with the current Baryonic-Acoustic-Oscillation measurement to perform a full cosmological analysis. To show the …
Icecube/DeepCore tests for novel explanations of the MiniBooNE anomaly
2019
While the low-energy excess observed at MiniBooNE remains unchallenged, it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile it with the results from other sterile neutrino searches and cosmology. Recently, it has been shown that non-minimal models with new particles in a hidden sector could provide a better fit to the data. As their main ingredients they require a GeV-scale $Z'$, kinetically mixed with the photon, and an unstable heavy neutrino with a mass in the 150 MeV range that mixes with the light neutrinos. In this letter we point out that atmospheric neutrino experiments (and, in particular, IceCube/DeepCore) could probe a significant fraction of the parameter space of such models by l…
Short distance neutrino oscillations with Borexino
2014
International audience; The Borexino detector has convincingly shown its outstanding performances in the low energy, sub-MeV regime through its unprecedented accomplishments in the solar and geo-neutrinos detection. These performances make it the ideal tool to accomplish a state-of-the-art experiment able to test unambiguously the long-standing issue of the existence of a sterile neutrino, as suggested by the several anomalous results accumulated over the past two decades, i.e. the outputs of the LSND and Miniboone experiments, the results of the source calibration of the two Gallium solar neutrino experiments, and the recently hinted reactor anomaly. The SOX project will exploit two source…
The liquid-argon scintillation pulseshape in DEAP-3600
2020
AbstractDEAP-3600 is a liquid-argon scintillation detector looking for dark matter. Scintillation events in the liquid argon (LAr) are registered by 255 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), and pulseshape discrimination (PSD) is used to suppress electromagnetic background events. The excellent PSD performance of LAr makes it a viable target for dark matter searches, and the LAr scintillation pulseshape discussed here is the basis of PSD. The observed pulseshape is a combination of LAr scintillation physics with detector effects. We present a model for the pulseshape of electromagnetic background events in the energy region of interest for dark matter searches. The model is composed of (a) LAr scin…
First operation of the KATRIN experiment with tritium
2020
AbstractThe determination of the neutrino mass is one of the major challenges in astroparticle physics today. Direct neutrino mass experiments, based solely on the kinematics of $$\upbeta $$β-decay, provide a largely model-independent probe to the neutrino mass scale. The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment is designed to directly measure the effective electron antineutrino mass with a sensitivity of $$0.2\hbox { eV}$$0.2eV ($$90\%$$90% CL). In this work we report on the first operation of KATRIN with tritium which took place in 2018. During this commissioning phase of the tritium circulation system, excellent agreement of the theoretical prediction with the recorded spectra was …