A New Spin on Neutrino Quantum Kinetics

Recent studies have demonstrated that in anisotropic environments a coherent spin-flip term arises in the Quantum Kinetic Equations (QKEs) which govern the evolution of neutrino flavor and spin in hot and dense media. This term can mediate neutrino-antineutrino transformation for Majorana neutrinos and active-sterile transformation for Dirac neutrinos. We discuss the physical origin of the coherent spin-flip term and provide explicit expressions for the QKEs in a two-flavor model with spherical geometry. In this context, we demonstrate that coherent neutrino spin transformation depends on the absolute neutrino mass and Majorana phases.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, Major changes compared to v1, accepted for publication in Physics Letters

Neutrino Quantum Kinetics

We present a formulation of the quantum kinetic equations (QKEs) which govern the evolution of neutrino flavor at high density and temperature. Here, the QKEs are derived from the ground up, using fundamental neutrino interactions and quantum field theory. We show that the resulting QKEs describe coherent flavor evolution with an effective mass when inelastic scattering is negligible. The QKEs also contain a collision term. This term can reduce to the collision term in the Boltzmann equation when scattering is dominant and the neutrino effective masses and density matrices become diagonal in the interaction basis. We also find that the QKE's include equations of motion for a new dynamical quantity related to neutrino spin. This quantity decouples from the equations of motion for the density matrices at low densities or in isotropic conditions. However, the spin equations of motion allow for the possibility of coherent transformation between neutrinos and antineutrinos at high densities and in the presence of anisotropy. Although the requisite conditions for this exist in the core collapse supernova and compact object merger environments, it is likely that only a self consistent incorporation of the QKEs in a sufficiently realistic model could establish whether or not significant neutrino-antineutrino conversion occurs.Comment: Revised version, published in Physical Review

The pionic beta decay in chiral perturbation theory

Within the framework of chiral perturbation theory with virtual photons and leptons, we present an updated analysis of the pionic beta decay including all electromagnetic contributions of order e**2 p**2. We discuss the extraction of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element |Vud| from experimental data. The method employed here is consistent with the analogous treatment of the Kl3 decays and the determination of |Vus|.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, latex file, uses EPJC macro

Radiative corrections to K_{l3} decays

We present a complete calculation of the K_{l3} decays K^+ --> pi^0 l^+ nu_l and K^0 --> pi^- l^+ nu_l to O(p^4, (m_d-m_u) p^2, e^2 p^2) in chiral perturbation theory with virtual photons and leptons. We introduce the concept of generalized form factors and kinematical densities in the presence of electromagnetism, and propose a possible treatment of the real photon emission in K^+_{l3} decays. We illustrate our results by applying them to the extraction of the Kobayashi--Maskawa matrix element |V_{us}| from the experimental K^+_{e3} decay parameters.Comment: 13 page

<VAP> Green Function in the Resonance Region

We analyse the three-point function of vector, axial-vector and pseudoscalar currents. In the spirit of large N_C, a resonance dominated Green function is confronted with the leading high-energy behaviour from the operator product expansion. The matching is shown to be fully compatible with a chiral resonance Lagrangian and it allows to determine some of the chiral low-energy constants of O(p^6).Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures. Published version. Results and conclusions unchange

Shining LUX on Isospin-Violating Dark Matter Beyond Leading Order

Isospin-violating dark matter (IVDM) has been proposed as a viable scenario to reconcile conflicting positive and null results from direct detection dark matter experiments. We show that the lowest-order dark matter-nucleus scattering rate can receive large and nucleus-dependent corrections at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the chiral expansion. The size of these corrections depends on the specific couplings of dark matter to quark flavors and gluons. In general the full NLO dark-matter-nucleus cross-section is not adequately described by just the zero-energy proton and neutron couplings. These statements are concretely illustrated in a scenario where the dark matter couples to quarks through scalar operators. We find the canonical IVDM scenario can reconcile the null XENON and LUX results and the recent CDMS-Si findings provided its couplings to second and third generation quarks either lie on a special line or are suppressed. Equally good fits with new values of the neutron-to-proton coupling ratio are found in the presence of nonzero heavy quark couplings. CDMS-Si remains in tension with LUX and XENON10/100 but is not excluded.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Neutrinoless double beta decay in chiral effective field theory: lepton number violation at dimension seven

We analyze neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) within the framework of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory. Apart from the dimension-five Weinberg operator, the first contributions appear at dimension seven. We classify the operators and evolve them to the electroweak scale, where we match them to effective dimension-six, -seven, and -nine operators. In the next step, after renormalization group evolution to the QCD scale, we construct the chiral Lagrangian arising from these operators. We develop a power-counting scheme and derive the two-nucleon $0\nu\beta\beta$ currents up to leading order in the power counting for each lepton-number-violating operator. We argue that the leading-order contribution to the decay rate depends on a relatively small number of nuclear matrix elements. We test our power counting by comparing nuclear matrix elements obtained by various methods and by different groups. We find that the power counting works well for nuclear matrix elements calculated from a specific method, while, as in the case of light Majorana neutrino exchange, the overall magnitude of the matrix elements can differ by factors of two to three between methods. We calculate the constraints that can be set on dimension-seven lepton-number-violating operators from $0\nu\beta\beta$ experiments and study the interplay between dimension-five and -seven operators, discussing how dimension-seven contributions affect the interpretation of $0\nu\beta\beta$ in terms of the effective Majorana mass $m_{\beta \beta}$.Comment: Matches version published in JHE

Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay and Lepton Flavor Violation

We point out that extensions of the Standard Model with low scale (~TeV) lepton number violation (LNV) generally lead to a pattern of lepton flavor violation (LFV) experimentally distinguishable from the one implied by models with GUT scale LNV. As a consequence, muon LFV processes provide a powerful diagnostic tool to determine whether or not the effective neutrino mass can be deduced from the rate of neutrinoless double beta decay. We discuss the role of \mu -> e \gamma and \mu -> e conversion in nuclei, which will be studied with high sensitivity in forthcoming experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

V(us) Determination from Hyperon Semileptonic Decays

We analyze the numerical determination of the quark mixing factor V(us) from hyperon semileptonic decays. The discrepancies between the results obtained in two previous studies are clarified. Our fits indicate sizeable SU(3) breaking corrections, which unfortunately can only be fully determined from the data at the first order. The lack of a reliable theoretical calculation of second-order symmetry breaking effects translates into a large systematic uncertainty, which has not been taken into account previously. Our final result, V(us) = 0.226 +/- 0.005, is not competitive with the existing determinations from K(l3), K(l2) and \tau decays.Comment: 16 pages, no figures. References added and other minor change