Matter Effects in Active-Sterile Solar Neutrino Oscillations

The matter effects for solar neutrino oscillations are studied in a general scheme with an arbitrary number of sterile neutrinos, without any constraint on the mixing, assuming only a realistic hierarchy of neutrino squared-mass differences in which the smallest squared-mass difference is effective in solar neutrino oscillations. The validity of the analytic results are illustrated with a numerical solution of the evolution equation in three examples of the possible mixing matrix in the simplest case of four-neutrino mixing.Comment: 26 pages. Final version published in Phys. Rev. D80 (2009) 11300

The B\to D_s^{(*)}\eta^{(\prime)} decays in the perturbative QCD

In this paper, we calculate the branching ratios for $B^+\to D_s^+\eta, B^+\to D_s^+\eta^{\prime}$, $B^+\to D_s^{*+}\eta$ and $B^+\to D_s^{*+}\eta^{\prime}$ decays by employing the perturbative QCD (pQCD) factorization approach. Under the two kinds of $\eta-\eta^{\prime}$ mixing schemes, the quark-flavor mixing scheme and the singlet-octet mixing scheme, we find that the calculated branching ratios are consistent with the currently available experimental upper limits. We also considered the so called "$f_{D_s}$ puzzle", by using two groups of parameters about the $D^{(*)}_s$ meson decay constants, that is $f_{D_s}=241$ MeV, $f_{D^*_s}=272$ MeV and $f_{D_s}=274$ MeV, $f_{D^*_s}=312$ MeV, to calculate the branching ratios for the considered decays. We find that the results change $30\%$ by using these two different groups of paramters.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure. Typos removed, minor correction

Captures of Hot and Warm Sterile Antineutrino Dark Matter on EC-decaying Ho-163 Nuclei

Capturing low-energy electron antineutrinos on radioactive Ho-163 nuclei, which decay into Dy-163 via electron capture (EC), is a noteworthy opportunity to detect relic sterile antineutrinos. Such hypothetical particles are more or less implied by current experimental and cosmological data, and they might be a part of hot dark matter or a candidate for warm dark matter in the Universe. Using the isotope Ho-163 as a target and assuming reasonable active-sterile antineutrino mixing angles, we calculate the capture rate of relic electron antineutrinos against the corresponding EC-decay background in the presence of sterile antineutrinos at the sub-eV or keV mass scale. We show that the signature of hot or warm sterile antineutrino dark matter should in principle be observable, provided the target is big enough and the energy resolution is good enough.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, more discussions and references added. To appear in JCA

Lattice gluodynamics at negative g^2

We consider Wilson's SU(N) lattice gauge theory (without fermions) at negative values of beta= 2N/g^2 and for N=2 or 3. We show that in the limit beta -> -infinity, the path integral is dominated by configurations where links variables are set to a nontrivial element of the center on selected non intersecting lines. For N=2, these configurations can be characterized by a unique gauge invariant set of variables, while for N=3 a multiplicity growing with the volume as the number of configurations of an Ising model is observed. In general, there is a discontinuity in the average plaquette when g^2 changes its sign which prevents us from having a convergent series in g^2 for this quantity. For N=2, a change of variables relates the gauge invariant observables at positive and negative values of beta. For N=3, we derive an identity relating the observables at beta with those at beta rotated by +- 2pi/3 in the complex plane and show numerical evidence for a Ising like first order phase transition near beta=-22. We discuss the possibility of having lines of first order phase transitions ending at a second order phase transition in an extended bare parameter space.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, uses revtex, Eqs. 15-17 corrected, minor change