No Arabic abstract
If neutrinos get mass via the seesaw mechanism the mixing matrix describing neutrino oscillations can be effectively non-unitary. We show that in this case the neutrino appearance probabilities involve a new CP phase, phi, associated to non-unitarity. This leads to an ambiguity in extracting the standard three--neutrino phase delta_CP, which can survive even after neutrino and antineutrino channels are combined. Its existence should be taken into account in the planning of any oscillation experiment aiming at a robust measurement of delta_CP.
Measurements of CP--violating observables in neutrino oscillation experiments have been studied in the literature as a way to determine the CP--violating phase in the mixing matrix for leptons. Here we show that such observables also probe new neutrino interactions in the production or detection processes. Genuine CP violation and fake CP violation due to matter effects are sensitive to the imaginary and real parts of new couplings. The dependence of the CP asymmetry on source--detector distance is different from the standard one and, in particular, enhanced at short distances. We estimate that future neutrino factories will be able to probe in this way new interactions that are up to four orders of magnitude weaker than the weak interactions. We discuss the possible implications for models of new physics.
We revisit the topic of triple-product asymmetries which probe CP violation through differential distributions. We construct distributions with well-defined discrete symmetry properties and characterize the asymmetries formed upon them. It is stressed that the simplest asymmetries may not be optimal. We explore systematic generalizations having limited reliance on the process dynamics and phase-space parametrization. They exploit larger fractions of the information contained in differential distributions and may lead to increased sensitivities to CP violation. Our detailed treatment of the case of spinless four-body decays paves the way for further experimental studies.
We consider a version of the low-scale type I seesaw mechanism for generating small neutrino masses, as an alternative to the standard seesaw scenario. It involves two right-handed (RH) neutrinos $ u_{1R}$ and $ u_{2R}$ having a Majorana mass term with mass $M$, which conserves the lepton charge $L$. The RH neutrino $ u_{2R}$ has lepton-charge conserving Yukawa couplings $g_{ell 2}$ to the lepton and Higgs doublet fields, while small lepton-charge breaking effects are assumed to induce tiny lepton-charge violating Yukawa couplings $g_{ell 1}$ for $ u_{1R}$, $l=e,mu,tau$. In this approach the smallness of neutrino masses is related to the smallness of the Yukawa coupling of $ u_{1R}$ and not to the large value of $M$: the RH neutrinos can have masses in the few GeV to a few TeV range. The Yukawa couplings $|g_{ell 2}|$ can be much larger than $|g_{ell 1}|$, of the order $|g_{ell 2}| sim 10^{-4} - 10^{-2}$, leading to interesting low-energy phenomenology. We consider a specific realisation of this scenario within the Froggatt-Nielsen approach to fermion masses. In this model the Dirac CP violation phase $delta$ is predicted to have approximately one of the values $delta simeq pi/4,, 3pi/4$, or $5pi/4,, 7pi/4$, or to lie in a narrow interval around one of these values. The low-energy phenomenology of the considered low-scale seesaw scenario of neutrino mass generation is also briefly discussed.
We examine the constraints on the MNS lepton mixing matrix from the present and future experimental data of the neutrino oscillation and lepton number violation processes. We introduce a graphical representation of the CP violation phases which appear in the lepton number violation processes such as neutrinoless double beta decay, the $mu^--e^+$ conversion, and the K decay, $K^-topi^+mu^-mu^-.$ Using this graphical representation, we derive the constraints on the CP violation phases in the lepton sector.
When neutrino masses arise from the exchange of neutral heavy leptons, as in most seesaw schemes, the effective lepton mixing matrix $N$ describing neutrino propagation is non-unitary, hence neutrinos are not exactly orthonormal. New CP violation phases appear in $N$ that could be confused with the standard phase $delta_{text{CP}}$ characterizing the three neutrino paradigm. We study the potential of the long-baseline neutrino experiment DUNE in probing CP violation induced by the standard CP phase in the presence of non-unitarity. In order to accomplish this we develop our previous formalism, so as to take into account the neutrino interactions with the medium, important in long baseline experiments such as DUNE. We find that the expected CP sensitivity of DUNE is somewhat degraded with respect to that characterizing the standard unitary case. However the effect is weaker than might have been expected thanks mainly to the wide neutrino beam. We also investigate the sensitivity of DUNE to the parameters characterizing non-unitarity. In this case we find that there is no improvement expected with respect to the current situation, unless the near detector setup is revamped.