Neutrinos Have Mass - So What?

In this brief review, I discuss the new physics unveiled by neutrino oscillation experiments over the past several years, and discuss several attempts at understanding the mechanism behind neutrino masses and lepton mixing. It is fair to say that, while significant theoretical progress has been made, we are yet to construct a coherent picture that naturally explains non-zero, yet tiny, neutrino masses and the newly revealed, puzzling patterns of lepton mixing. I discuss what the challenges are, and point to the fact that more experimental input (from both neutrino and non-neutrino experiments) is dearly required - and that new data is expected to reveal, in the next several years, new information. Finally, I draw attention to the fact that neutrinos may have only just begun to reshape fundamental physics, given the fact that we are still to explain the LSND anomaly and because the neutrino oscillation phenomenon is ultimately sensitive to very small new-physics effects.Comment: invited brief review, 15 pages, 1 eps figure, typo corrected, reference adde

A Survey of Lepton Number Violation Via Effective Operators

We survey 129 lepton number violating effective operators, consistent with the minimal Standard Model gauge group and particle content, of mass dimension up to and including eleven. Upon requiring that each one radiatively generates the observed neutrino masses, we extract an associated characteristic cutoff energy scale which we use to calculate other observable manifestations of these operators for a number of current and future experimental probes, concentrating on lepton number violating phenomena. These include searches for neutrinoless double-beta decay and rare meson, lepton, and gauge boson decays. We also consider searches at hadron/lepton collider facilities in anticipation of the LHC and the future ILC. We find that some operators are already disfavored by current data, while more are ripe to be probed by next-generation experiments. We also find that our current understanding of lepton mixing disfavors a subset of higher dimensional operators. While neutrinoless double-beta decay is the most promising signature of lepton number violation for the majority of operators, a handful is best probed by other means. We argue that a combination of constraints from various independent experimental sources will help to pinpoint the ``correct'' model of neutrino mass, or at least aid in narrowing down the set of possibilities.Comment: 34 pages, 10 eps figures, 1 tabl

On The Decaying-Sterile Neutrino Solution to the Electron (Anti)Neutrino Appearance Anomalies

We explore the hypothesis that the unexplained data from LSND and MiniBooNE are evidence for a new, heavy neutrino mass-eigenstate that mixes with the muon-type neutrino and decays into an electron-type neutrino and a new, very light scalar particle. We consider two different decay scenarios, one with Majorana neutrinos, one with Dirac neutrinos; both fit the data equally well. We find a reasonable, albeit not excellent, fit to the data of MiniBooNE and LSND. The decaying-sterile-neutrino hypothesis, however, cleanly evades constraints from disappearance searches and precision measurements of leptonic meson decays, as long as $1~{\rm MeV}\gtrsim m_4\gtrsim 10$~keV. The SBN program at Fermilab should be able to definitively test the decaying-sterile-neutrino hypothesis.Comment: This version v2 has been accepted for publication in JHEP. The changes from previous version are: inclusion of the data from KARMEN in the analysis, a new subsection about the sensitivity of SBN to nonzero decay effects, an new appendix describing the details of MiniBooNE analysis, additional references and some other minor change

Desenvolvimento de método por CLUE-EM-EM para detecção de adulterantes em café.

Food: the tree that sustains life. 468

Estudo da estabilidade das antocianinas majoritárias do fruto do jambo vermelho (Syzygium malaccense L. Merryl & Perry).

O objetivo deste estudo é avaliar a estabilidade das antocianinas majoritárias de um produto em pó, obtido a partir de um processo simples e de baixo custo, da casca do jambo vermelho

Seasonal Variations of the 7Be Solar Neutrino Flux

Measuring the 7Be solar neutrino flux is crucial towards solving the solar neutrino puzzle. The Borexino experiment, and possibly the KamLAND experiment, will be capable of studying the 7Be neutrinos in the near future. We discuss (1) how the seasonal variation of the Borexino and KamLAND data can be used to measure the 7Be solar neutrino flux in a background independent way and (2) how anomalous seasonal variations might be used to discover vacuum neutrino oscillations, independent of the solar model and the measurement of the background. In particular, we find that, after three years of Borexino or KamLAND running, vacuum neutrino oscillations can be either established or excluded for almost all values of (sin^2 2 theta, Delta m^2) preferred by the Homestake, GALLEX, SAGE, and Super-Kamiokande data. We also discuss how well seasonal variations of the data can be used to measure (sin^2 2 theta, Delta m^2) in the case of vacuum oscillations.Comment: 39 pages, 13 figures, uses psfig. Now the impact of the MSW effect on vacuum oscillations taken into account. Conclusions unchanged. References adde

Analytical description of quasivacuum oscillations of solar neutrinos

We propose a simple prescription to calculate the solar neutrino survival probability P_{ee} in the quasivacuum oscillation (QVO) regime. Such prescription is obtained by matching perturbative and exact analytical results, which effectively take into account the density distribution in the Sun as provided by the standard solar model. The resulting analytical recipe for the calculation of P_{ee} is shown to reach its highest accuracy |\Delta P_{ee}| < 2.6 x 10^{-2} in the whole QVO range) when the familiar prescription of choosing the solar density scale parameter r_0 at the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) resonance point is replaced by a new one, namely, when r_0 is chosen at the point of ``maximal violation of adiabaticity'' (MVA) along the neutrino trajectory in the Sun. The MVA prescription admits a smooth transition from the QVO regime to the MSW transition one. We discuss in detail the phase acquired by neutrinos in the Sun, and show that it might be of relevance for the studies of relatively short timescale variations of the fluxes of the solar \nu lines in the future real-time solar neutrino experiments. Finally, we elucidate the role of matter effects in the convective zone of the Sun.Comment: 25 pages (RevTeX) + 11 figures (postscript

The Oscillation Probability of GeV Solar Neutrinos of All Active Species

In this paper, I address the oscillation probability of O(GeV) neutrinos of all active flavours produced inside the Sun and detected at the Earth. Flavours other than electron-type neutrinos may be produced, for example, by the annihilation of WIMPs which may be trapped inside the Sun. In the GeV energy regime, matter effects are important both for the ``1-3'' system and the ``1-2'' system, and for different neutrino mass hierarchies. A numerical scan of the multidimensional three-flavour parameter space is performed, ``inspired'' by the current experimental situation. One important result is that, in the three-flavour oscillation case, P{alpha,beta} is different from P{beta,alpha} for a significant portion of the parameter space, even if there is no CP-violating phase in the MNS matrix. Furthermore, P{mu,mu} has a significantly different behaviour from P{tau,tau}, which may affect expectations for the number of events detected at large neutrino telescopes.Comment: 38 pages, 10 figure