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

Indirect unitarity violation entangled with matter effects in reactor antineutrino oscillations

If finite but tiny masses of the three active neutrinos are generated via the canonical seesaw mechanism with three heavy sterile neutrinos, the 3\times 3 Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata neutrino mixing matrix V will not be exactly unitary. This kind of indirect unitarity violation can be probed in a precision reactor antineutrino oscillation experiment, but it may be entangled with terrestrial matter effects as both of them are very small. We calculate the probability of \overline{\nu}_e \to \overline{\nu}_e oscillations in a good analytical approximation, and find that, besides the zero-distance effect, the effect of unitarity violation is always smaller than matter effects, and their entanglement does not appear until the next-to-leading-order oscillating terms are taken into account. Given a 20-kiloton JUNO-like liquid scintillator detector, we reaffirm that terrestrial matter effects should not be neglected but indirect unitarity violation makes no difference, and demonstrate that the experimental sensitivities to the neutrino mass ordering and a precision measurement of \theta_{12} and \Delta_{21} \equiv m^2_2 - m^2_1 are robust.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, version to be published in PLB, more discussions adde

Robust Spin Squeezing Preservation in Photonic Crystal Cavities

We show that the robust spin squeezing preservation can be achieved by utilizing detuning modification for an ensemble of N separate two-level atoms embedded in photonic crystal cavities (PCC). In particular, we explore the different dynamical behaviors of spin squeezing between isotropic and anisotropic PCC cases when the atomic frequency is inside the band gap. In both cases, it is shown that the robust preservation of spin squeezing is completely determined by the formation of bound states. Intriguingly, we find that unlike the isotropic case where steady-state spin squeezing varies smoothly when the atomic frequency moves from the inside to the outside band edge, a sudden transition occurs for the anisotropic case. The present results may be of direct importance for, e.g., quantum metrology in open quantum systems.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Laser Physics Letter