The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment

The Daya Bay reactor neutrino experiment is designed to study the disappearance of antineutrinos from the Daya Bay nuclear power plant in China. The goal of this experiment is to measure the remaining unknown neutrino mixing parameter theta13 with high precision: sin^2(2Θ_(13))<0.01. The experiment is presently under construction and it is anticipated that data acquisition will begin in 2011

Aspects of SU(3) baryon extrapolation

We report on a recent chiral extrapolation, based on an SU(3) framework, of octet baryon masses calculated in 2+1-flavour lattice QCD. Here we further clarify the form of the extrapolation, the estimation of the infinite-volume limit, the extracted low-energy constants and the corrections in the strange-quark mass.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, pdftex, prepared for the proceedings of CIPANP 09, San Diego, USA, March 26-31, 200

Dark Matter in B-L Extended MSSM Models

We analyze the dark matter problem in the context of supersymmetric U(1)_{B-L} model. In this model, the lightest neutalino can be the B-L gaugino widetilde {Z}_{B-L} or the extra Higgsinos widetilde{chi}_{1,2} dominated. We compute the thermal relic abundance of these particles and show that, unlike the LSP in MSSM, they can account for the observed relic abundance with no conflict with other phenomenological constraints. The prospects for their direct detection, if they are part of our galactic halo, are also discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures. Published versio

QCD Effects in Cosmology

The cosmological evolution in the radiation dominated regimen is usually computed by assuming an ideal relativistic thermal bath. In this note, we discuss the deviation from the non-interaction assumption. In either the standard model (SM) and the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), the main contribution comes from the strong interaction. An understanding of these effects are important for precision measurements and for the evolution of scalar modes, where the commented corrections constitute the main source of the dynamics.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Contributed to CIPANP 2009: Tenth Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics, May 26-31, 2009, San Diego, Californi