Towards the detection of light and heavy relic neutrinos

The standard Big Bang cosmology predicts that the universe is abundantly populated with neutrinos. As expected there are at least 114 neutrinos per cubic centimeter averaged over the whole space. Like the cosmic background radiation the cosmic neutrinos at present posses a very small kinetic energy due to expansion of the universe. This prediction is one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. On the other hand the existence of cosmic neutrinos has not yet been confirmed by direct detection experiments. For now we only have a lower limit on the total mass of this free floating ghostly gas of neutrinos, but even so it is roughly equivalent to the total mass of all the visible stars in universe. There could be many more neutrinos at Earth because of condensation of neutrinos, now moving slowly under the gravitational pull of our galaxy. Here we discuss the possibility of detection of relic neutrinos in KATRIN and MARE experiments via neutrino capture on tritium and rhenium, respectively. We also examine single and double relic neutrino capture on double β-decaying nuclei which might be relevant in the context of the new generation double beta decay experiments. Further we explore feasibility of experiments for detection of heavy sterile neutrinos with masses in MeV region, which may have important astrophysical and cosmological implications.     

Possible violation of the spin-statistics relation for neutrinos: checking through future galactic supernova

We use the detection of neutrinos from a future galactic type-II supernova event in a water Cerenkov detector like Super-Kamiokande to constrain the possible violation of spin-statistics by neutrinos resulting in their obeying a mixed statistics instead of Fermi–Dirac.     

Phenomenological analysis of hybrid textures of neutrinos

We present a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of the allowed hybrid textures of neutrinos. Out of a total of sixty hybrid textures with one equality between the elements of neutrino mass matrix and one texture zero only twenty three are found to be viable at 99% C.L. whereas the earlier analysis found fifty four to be viable. We examine the phenomenological implications of the allowed hybrid textures including Majorana type CP-violating phases, 1–3 mixing angle and Dirac type CP-violating phase, δ. We, also, obtain lower bound on effective Majorana mass for all the allowed hybrid textures.     

Results from atmospheric neutrinos

With the announcement of new evidence for muon neutrino disappearance observed by the super-Kamiokande experiment, the more than a decade old atmospheric neutrino anomaly moved from a possible indication for neutrino oscillations to an apparently inescapable fact. The evidence is reviewed, and new indications are presented that the oscillations are probably between muon and tau neutrinos. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Oscillation of Dirac and Majorana neutrinos from muon decay in the case of a general interaction

We analyse the possibility of distinguishing Dirac and Majorana neutrinos in future neutrino factory experiments in which neutrinos are produced in muon decay when, in addition to a vector type as in the SM, there are also scalar interactions. We check this possibility in an experiment with a near detector, where the observed neutrinos do not oscillate, and in a far detector, after the neutrino oscillations. Neglecting higher-order corrections, even neutrino observation in the near detector does not give a chance to differentiate their character. However, this possibility appears in the leading-order after the neutrino oscillations observed in far detector.     

Charged lepton production from iron induced by atmospheric neutrinos

The charged current lepton production induced by neutrinos in ⁵⁶Fe nuclei has been studied. The calculations have been done for the quasielastic as well as the inelastic reactions assuming Δ-dominance and take into account the effect of Pauli blocking, Fermi motion and the renormalization of weak transition strengths in the nuclear medium. The quasielastic production cross-sections for lepton production are found to be strongly reduced due to nuclear effects, while there is about 10% reduction in the inelastic cross-sections in the absence of the final-state interactions of the pions. The numerical results for the momentum and angular distributions of the leptons averaged over the various atmospheric-neutrino spectra at the Soudan and Gran Sasso sites have been presented. The effect of nuclear-model dependence and the atmospheric-flux dependence on the relative yield of μ to e has been studied and discussed.     

A step toward CNO solar neutrino detection in liquid scintillators

The detection of CNO solar neutrinos in ultrapure liquid scintillator detectors is limited by the background produced by bismuth-210 nuclei that undergo β-decay to polonium-210 with a lifetime of ∼7 days. Polonium-210 nuclei are unstable and decay with a lifetime equal to ∼200 days emitting α particles that can be also detected. In this Letter, we show that the Bi-210 background can be determined by looking at the time evolution of α-decay rate of Po-210, provided that α particle detection efficiency is stable over the data acquisition period and external sources of Po-210 are negligible. A sufficient accuracy can be obtained in a relatively short time. As an example, if the initial Po-210 event rate is ∼2000 cpd/100 ton or lower, a Borexino-like detector could start discerning CNO neutrino signal from Bi-210 background in Δt∼1 yr.     

Physics opportunities with supernova neutrinos

The high-statistics neutrino signal from the next nearby supernova (SN) would provide a bonanza of astrophysical and particle-physics information. In particular, there are two new developments in this field: (i) The SASI instability can imprint potentially detectable short-time variations on the neutrino signal. (ii) Collective neutrino oscillations strongly modify the previous paradigm of SN neutrino oscillations with potentially detectable consequences.     

Transmission of neutrinos through matter

Neutrinos travel through matter with negligible absorption except in very extreme situations. However, the index of refraction of neutrinos can play an important role in the oscillation of one type of neutrino to another when passing through matter.     

Coherence and oscillations of cosmic neutrinos

For cosmic neutrinos we study the conditions and the effects of the coherence loss as well as coherent broadening of the spectrum. We evaluate the width of the neutrino wavepacket produced by charged particles under various circumstances: in an interaction-free environment, in a radiation-dominated medium (typical of the sources of the gamma ray bursts) and in the presence of a magnetic field. The effect of the magnetic field on the wavepacket size appears to be more important than the scattering. If the magnetic field at the source is larger than 10 Gauss, the coherence of neutrinos will be lost while traveling over cosmological distances. Various applications of these results have been considered. We find that for large magnetic fields (B>10⁹ Gauss) and high energies (E_ν>PeV), “coherent broadening” can modify the energy spectrum of neutrinos. In the coherent case, averaging out the oscillatory terms of the probabilities does not induce any statistical uncertainty beyond what expected in the absence of these terms. A deviation from the standard quantum mechanics that preserves average energy and unitarity cannot alter the picture.     

Physics with underwater neutrino telescopes

We give a short review of the ongoing efforts in the construction of large underwater photomultiplier arrays aiming at the detection of neutrinos of astrophysical origin.     

Three flavour oscillation interpretation of neutrino data

I consider the mixing of the three active neutrino flavours and obtain the constraints on the parameters of this mixing from the solar, atmospheric and reactor neutrino data.     

Cosmogenic neutrinos and gamma rays

We describe the photoproduction interactions of ultrahigh energy protons on the universal photon backgrounds and the production of very high-energy neutrinos and γ-rays in such interactions. We compare the production in propagation in the microwave background to that in the extragalactic background light. The propagation of heavy nuclei is discussed only briefly. We show the extreme models for cosmogenic neutrino production and the limits set on them by different experiments.     

The discovery of neutrino oscillations

The Nobel Prize for physics 2015 was awarded to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, showing that neutrinos have a mass. This article describes the two areas of research namely the atmospheric neutrino anomaly and the problem of missing solar neutrinos which lead to these groundbreaking discoveries.     

Probing pseudo-Dirac neutrino through detection of neutrino-induced muons from gamma ray burst neutrinos

The possibility to verify the pseudo-Dirac nature of neutrinos is investigated here via the detection of ultra-high energy neutrinos from distant cosmological objects like γ-ray bursts (GRBs). The very long baseline and the energy range from ∼TeV to ∼EeV for such neutrinos invoke the likelihood to probe very small pseudo-Dirac splittings. The expected secondary muons from such neutrinos that can be detected by a kilometer scale detector such as ICECUBE is calculated and compared with the same in the case of mass-flavour oscillations and for no oscillation cases. The calculated muon yields indicate that to probe such small pseudo-Dirac splittings one needs to look for a nearby GRB (red shift z ∼ 0.03 or less) whereas for a distant GRB (z ∼ 1) the flux will be much depleted and such phenomenon cannot be distinguished. Also calculated are the muon-to-shower ratios.      

Nuclear responses for neutrinos and neutrino studies by double beta decays and inverse beta decays

This is a brief report on recent studies of nuclear responses for neutrinos (v) by charge exchange reactions, v masses by double beta (ββ) decays and of solar and supernova v’s by inverse β decays. Subjects discussed include (1) v studies in nuclear micro-laboratories, (2) v masses studied by ββ decays of ¹⁰⁰Mo and nuclear responses for ββ — v, (3) solar and supernova v’s by inverse β decays and v responses for ⁷¹Ga and ¹⁰⁰Mo, and (4) MOON (molybdenum observatory of neutrinos) for spectroscopic studies of Majorana v masses with sensitivity of m _v ∼ 0.03 eV by ββ decays of ¹⁰⁰Mo and real-time studies of low energy solar and supernova v’s by inverse β decays of ¹⁰⁰Mo.     

Space based studies of UHE neutrinos

The Universe at Ultra-High Energies (UHE) above is largely unexplored. In this paper we focus on the search for UHE neutrinos. After briefly summarizing the science rationale for neutrino studies at UHE, we describe the Extreme Universe Space Observatory (EUSO) onboard the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) of the International Space Station.