Opportunities for probing U ( 1 ) T 3 R with light mediators
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LArTPCs are widely used in neutrino experiments at the GeV scale. They measure the charge and light produced by interactions between charged particles and argon atoms. While charge is collected efficiently, light is not. TinyTPC is a small scale LArTPC with a pixelated readout for R&D with photosensitive dopants, which convert light into charge. TinyTPC studies the effects of adding photosensitive dopants and xenon to liquid argon to enhance charge signals of events in the MeV scale.
Mathematical analysis and dispersion relations are used to obtain the general functional form of the neutrino charge form-factor. It is shown that if the scale for weak interactions is given by G, where G is the Fermi coupling constant, then for a large range of momentum transfer values, the form-factor may be approximated by a function that is linear in the square of the momentum transfer.
The conservation of lepton flavor is a prediction of the Standard Model and is still an excellent approximate symmetry despite our observation of neutrino oscillations. Lepton flavor violation by one or two units has been discussed for decades, with several dedicated experiments exploring the vast model landscape but no discoveries so far. Here, we explore operators and processes that violate at least one lepton flavor by three units and identify testable signatures. In the Standard Model effective field theory, such operators already arise at mass dimension 7 and can be tested through their contributions to Michel parameters in leptonic decays. True neutrinoless charged-lepton flavor violation arises at mass dimension 10 and can realistically only be seen in the tau decay channels 𝜏 → $𝑒𝑒𝑒\bar{𝜇}\bar{𝜇}$ or 𝜏 → $𝜇𝜇𝜇\bar{𝑒}\bar{𝑒}$, for example in Belle II. Testable rates for these tau decays require light new particles and subsequently predict an avalanche of remarkably clean but so-far unconstrained collider signatures.
Neutrino, gamma-ray, electron and positron production resulting from inelastic proton-proton collisions in a highly relativistic plasma such as may exist in extragalactic radio or gamma-ray burst sources is examined. The source functions of primary (pions, kaons, and neutrons) and secondary (photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos) products of relativistic nuclear collisions are computed for the cases of power law and Maxwellian relativistic proton distributions. It is shown that in plasma which is optically thin to interactions between the plasma and secondary gamma-rays, electrons and positrons, only a small fraction of the initial energy is emitted in the observable form of neutrinos and gamma rays. In an optically thick plasma on the other hand, most of the energy of the relativistic protons is found to be equally divided between gamma rays and neutrinos, although only the neutrinos may escape freely to be observed.
The charge-conjugation and parity-reversal (CP) symmetry of fundamental particles is a symmetry between matter and antimatter. Violation of this CP symmetry was first observed in 1964, and CP violation in the weak interactions of quarks was soon established. Sakharov proposed that CP violation is necessary to explain the observed imbalance of matter and antimatter abundance in the Universe. Yet, CP violation in quarks is too small to support this explanation. So far, CP violation has not been observed in non-quark elementary particle systems. It has been shown that CP violation in leptons could generate the matter–antimatter disparity through a process called leptogenesis. Leptonic mixing, which appears in the standard model’s charged current interactions, provides a potential source of CP violation through a complex phase δ CP , which is required by some theoretical models of leptogenesis. This CP violation can be measured in muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations and the corresponding antineutrino oscillations, which are experimentally accessible using accelerator-produced beams as established by the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) and NOvA experiments. Until now, the value of δ CP has not been substantially constrained by neutrino oscillation experiments. Here we report a measurement using long-baseline neutrino and antineutrino oscillations observed by the T2K experiment that shows a large increase in the neutrino oscillation probability, excluding values of δ CP that result in a large increase in the observed antineutrino oscillation probability at three standard deviations (3σ). The 3σ confidence interval for δ CP , which is cyclic and repeats every 2π, is [-3.41, -0.03] for the so-called normal mass ordering and [-2.54, -0.32] for the inverted mass ordering. Our findings indicate CP violation in leptons and our method enables sensitive searches for matter–antimatter asymmetry in neutrino oscillations using accelerator-produced neutrino beams. Future measurements with larger datasets will test whether leptonic CP violation is larger than the CP violation in quarks.
This public note presents an investigation of low-energy electron-neutrino events in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam by the MicroBooNE experiment. This search is motivated by the excess of low energy electromagnetic events observed by the MiniBooNE experiment and, more broadly, by the landscape of neutrino anomalies observed at short baselines. This is the first measurement to use all of the data collected by the MicroBooNE experiment, corresponding to $1.1\times 10^{21}$ protons on target. Two exclusive samples of electron neutrinos without visible pions are used, one with visible protons and one without any visible protons. MicroBooNE data is compared to two empirical models of the MiniBooNE low energy excess, one obtained by enhancing the electron-neutrino content as a function of the neutrino energy, and one representing the excess for the first time as a function of the kinematics of shower energy and angle. This measurement excludes an electron-like interpretation of the MiniBooNE excess based on these models at $\geq 99\%$ confidence level in all kinematic variables.
We study the scattering of neutrinos on polarized and unpolarized free nucleons, and also the polarization of recoil particles in these scatters. In contrast to electromagnetic processes, the parity-violating weak interaction gives rise to large spin asymmetries at leading order. Future polarization measurements could provide independent access to the proton axial structure and allow the first extraction of the pseudoscalar form factor from neutrino data without the conventional partially conserved axial current (PCAC) ansatz and assumptions about the pion-pole dominance. The pseudoscalar form factor can be accessed with precise measurements with muon (anti)neutrinos of a few hundreds MeV of energy or with tau (anti)neutrinos. The axial form factor can be extracted from scattering measurements using accelerator neutrinos of all energies.
The production cross section of 30.92 GeV/c protons on carbon is measured by the NA61/SHINE spectrometer at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron by means of beam attenuation in a copy (replica) of the 90-cm-long target of the T2K neutrino oscillation experiment. The employed method for direct production cross-section estimation minimizes model corrections for elastic and quasielastic interactions. The obtained production cross section is $σ_{\text{prod}}$ = 227.6 ± 0.8(stat)$_{\text{-3.2}}^{\text{+1.9}}$(sys) – 0.8(mod) mb. It is in agreement with previous NA61/SHINE results obtained with a thin carbon target, while providing improved precision with a total fractional uncertainty of less than 2%. This direct measurement will reduce the uncertainty of the T2K neutrino flux prediction.
Regression Convolutional Neural Network for Energy Estimation in NOvA" Abstract: "NOvA (NuMI Off-Axis $\nu_e$ Appearance) is a long baseline neutrino experiment designed to measure neutrino oscillations over a distance of 810 km. NOvA employs a near and far detector to observe $\nu_\mu$ disappearance and $\nu_e$ appearance of neutrinos produced by the NuMI beam at Fermilab. Energy reconstruction is critical for precise measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters and cross sections, which are functions of neutrino energy. Energy estimation remains difficult due to the complexity of detector response and final state particle kinematics. We present a regression-based convolutional neural network (CNN) method that reconstructs neutrino and lepton energies based on raw pixel inputs for NOvA. The trained model is able to reconstruct event energy for different interaction modes and complex final states containing leptons and hadrons. Studies of regression CNN networks show improved energy resolution and reduced sensitivity to calibration scale uncertainties relative to traditional kinematics-based energy reconstruction techniques. The results demonstrate the potential of the regression CNN method for neutrino physics analyses by improving on standard kinematics-based reconstruction.
Searches for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter will in the near future be sensitive to solar neutrinos. Directional detection offers a method to reject solar neutrinos and improve WIMP searches, but reaching that sensitivity with existing directional detectors poses challenges. We propose a combined atomic/particle physics approach using a large-volume diamond detector. WIMP candidate events trigger a particle detector, after which spectroscopy of nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers reads out the direction of the incoming particle. Here we discuss the current state of technologies required to realize directional detection in diamond and present a path towards a detector with sensitivity below the neutrino floor.
This Letter presents results of a search for the mixing of a sub-eV sterile neutrino with three active neutrinos based on the full data sample of the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, collected during 3158 days of detector operation, which contains 5.55 × 106 reactor $\overline{v}$ e candidates identified as inverse beta-decay interactions followed by neutron capture on gadolinium. The analysis benefits from a doubling of the statistics of our previous result and from improvements of several important systematic uncertainties. No significant oscillation due to mixing of a sub-eV sterile neutrino with active neutrinos was found. Exclusion limits are set by both Feldman-Cousins and CLs methods. Light sterile neutrino mixing with sin 2 2θ 14 ≳ 0.01 can be excluded at 95% confidence level in the region of 0.01 eV 2 ≲ |Δ$m$$^{2}_{41}$| ≲ 0.1 eV 2 . This result represents the world-leading constraints in the region of 2 × 10 –4 eV 2 ≲ |Δ$m$$^{2}_{41}$| ≲ 0.2 eV 2 .
The NuMI flux prediction being used by all experiments at Fermilab that are sensitive to the NuMI beam is based on Geant v4.9.2.03 (G4.9) and uses the default FTFP-BERT physics list with no custom cross sections. In order to correct these predictions to match world data, PPFX, the Package to Predict the FluX, is used to reweight the flux prediction. In kinematic regions of overlap between the prediction and data, mainly NA49 measurements are used to correct for various hadron production processes. Specifcally, PPFX looks at the entire ancestry chain of the neutrino, up to the incident 120 GeV proton beam, and applies corrections for various hadron interactions based on said data. These corrections are implemented as a function of the Feynman-x (x F ) and transverse momentum (p T ) of the incident hadron.
NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino experiment based at Fermilab, dedicated to measuring various neutrino oscillation parameters. Recently, the NOvA collaboration presented new results at NEUTRINO 2024. A significant enhancement in the modeling of charged-current quasi elastic (CCQE) interactions has been achieved with the implementation of the Hartree-Fock (HF) mean-field model, incorporating continuum random phase approximation (CRPA) corrections. This HF-CRPA model offers substantial improvements in the low-energy region. In this presentation, I will discuss the impact of the HF-CRPA model on the latest three-flavor oscillation results of the NOvA experiment.
The invention of Skipper-CCDs with sub-electron noise has paved the way for groundbreaking low-threshold dark matter (DM) experiments, such as SENSEI and DAMIC. Conventionally, these experiments are deployed underground to mitigate cosmogenic backgrounds; however, some DM signatures are inaccessible to underground experiments due to attenuation in the Earth’s atmosphere and crust. The DarkNESS mission will deploy an array of Skipper-CCDs on a 6U CubeSat in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to search for electron recoils from strongly-interacting sub-GeV DM as well as X-ray line signatures from sterile neutrino decay. Using a series of observations from LEO, the DarkNESS mission will set competitive upper limits on the DM-electron scattering cross section and help resolve the experimental conundrum associated with the purported observation of a 3.5 keV X-ray line, potentially produced from sterile neutrino decay. This work will describe the DarkNESS instrument, the technical challenges in operating Skipper-CCDs in the space environment, the scientific objectives of the DarkNESS mission, and the DM parameter space that DarkNESS will probe.
The Orion complex is a source of gamma rays attributed to the de-excitation of fast carbon and oxygen nuclei excited through interactions with ambient hydrogen and helium. This has consequences for the production and evolution of light isotopes in the Galaxy, as massive stars appear as prolific sources of C-O rich low energy nuclei. The different stages of massive star evolution are considered in relation to the acceleration of nuclei to moderate energies. It is concluded that the low energy nuclear component originating from massive stars plays a larger role than the usual Galactic cosmic rays in shaping the evolution of Li-6, Be-9, B-10 and B-11, especially in the early Galactic evolution. The enhancement of the B-11/B-10 ratio observed in meteorites and in the interstellar medium is attributed to the interaction of low energy carbon nuclei with ambient H and to a lesser degree, to neutrino spallation.
Dynamical coupled-channel (DCC) approaches parametrize the interactions and dynamics of two and more hadrons and their response to different electroweak probes. The inclusion of unitarity, three-body channels, and other properties from scattering theory allows for a reliable extraction of resonance spectra and their properties from data. Here, we review the formalism and application of the ANL-Osaka, the Juelich-Bonn-Washington, and other DCC approaches in the context of light baryon resonances from meson, (virtual) photon, and neutrino-induced reactions, as well as production reactions, strange baryons, light mesons, heavy meson systems, exotics, and baryon-baryon interactions. Finally, we also provide a connection of the formalism to study finite-volume spectra obtained in Lattice QCD, and review applications involving modern statistical and machine learning tools.