815 research outputs found
The seesaw portal in testable models of neutrino masses
A Standard Model extension with two Majorana neutrinos can explain the
measured neutrino masses and mixings, and also account for the
matter-antimatter asymmetry in a region of parameter space that could be
testable in future experiments. The testability of the model relies to some
extent on its minimality. In this paper we address the possibility that the
model might be extended by extra generic new physics which we parametrize in
terms of a low-energy effective theory. We consider the effects of the
operators of the lowest dimensionality, , and evaluate the upper bounds on
the coefficients so that the predictions of the minimal model are robust. One
of the operators gives a new production mechanism for the heavy neutrinos at
LHC via higgs decays. The higgs can decay to a pair of such neutrinos that,
being long-lived, leave a powerful signal of two displaced vertices. We
estimate the LHC reach to this process.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure
The seesaw path to leptonic CP violation
Future experiments such as SHiP and high-intensity colliders will
have a superb sensitivity to heavy Majorana neutrinos with masses below .
We show that the measurement of the mixing to electrons and muons of one such
state could imply the discovery of leptonic CP violation in the context of
seesaw models. We quantify in the minimal model the CP discovery potential of
these future experiments, and demonstrate that a 5 CL discovery of
leptonic CP violation would be possible in a very significant fraction of
parameter space.Comment: An error has been fixed, main conclusions unchange
Statistical tests of sterile neutrinos using cosmology and short-baseline data
In this paper we revisit the question of the information which cosmology
provides on the scenarios with sterile neutrinos invoked to describe the SBL
anomalies using Bayesian statistical tests. We perform an analysis of the
cosmological data in CDM cosmologies for different
cosmological data combinations, and obtain the marginalized cosmological
likelihood in terms of the two relevant parameters, the sterile neutrino mass
and its contribution to the energy density of the early Universe . We then present an analysis to quantify at which level a model with one
sterile neutrino is (dis)favoured with respect to a model with only three
active neutrinos, using results from both short-baseline experiments and
cosmology. We study the dependence of the results on the cosmological data
considered, in particular on the inclusion of the recent BICEP2 results and the
SZ cluster data from the Planck mission. We find that only when the cluster
data is included the model with one extra sterile neutrino can become more
favoured that the model with only the three active ones provided the sterile
neutrino contribution to radiation density is suppressed with respect to the
fully thermalized scenario. We have also quantified the level of
(in)compatibility between the sterile neutrino masses implied by the
cosmological and SBL results.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure
Slipping interfaces: A possible source of S radiation from explosive sources
We consider the problem of reflection and refraction of purely compressional waves incident on an interface separating identical solid half-spaces in which the condition of continuity of shear displacement at the boundary is generalized to one that allows slippage. The problem is solved using the Cagniard-de Hoop technique. It is found that the generation of reflected P and S waves, as well as transmitted S waves, is most effective in the case of perfectly unbounded half-spaces. We discuss the implications of this model for the generation of S waves by block movement in the vicinity of an underground explosion
Effect of New Physics in Astrophysical Neutrino Flavor
The authors acknowledge support from the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center FIG. 4 (color). (WIPAC). C. A. and J. S. were supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Grants No. OPP-0236449 and No. PHY-0969061) and by the University of Wisconsin Research Committee with funds granted by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. T. K. is supported by STFC, UK
Test of Lorentz Violation with Astrophysical Neutrino Flavor
Presented at the Seventh Meeting on CPT and Lorentz Symmetry, Bloomington, Indiana, June 20-24, 201
MR coil sensitivity inhomogeneity correction for plaque characterization in carotid arteries
We are involved in a comprehensive program to characterize atherosclerotic disease using multiple MR images having different contrast mechanisms (T1W, T2W, PDW, magnetization transfer, etc.) of human carotid and animal model arteries. We use specially designed intravascular and surface array coils that give high signal-to-noise but suffer from sensitivity inhomogeneity. With carotid surface coils, challenges include: (1) a steep bias field with an 80% change; (2) presence of nearby muscular structures lacking high frequency information to distinguish bias from anatomical features; (3) many confounding zero-valued voxels subject to fat suppression, blood flow cancellation, or air, which are not subject to coil sensitivity; and (4) substantial noise. Bias was corrected using a modification of the adaptive fuzzy c-mean method reported by Pham et al. (IEEE TMI, 18:738-752), whereby a bias field modeled as a mechanical membrane was iteratively improved until cluster means no longer changed. Because our images were noisy, we added a noise reduction filtering step between iterations and used approximate to5 classes. In a digital phantom having a bias field measured from our MR system, variations across an area comparable to a carotid artery were reduced from 50% t
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