No Arabic abstract
Atmospheric neutrinos travel very long distances through earth matter. It is expected that the matter effects lead to significant changes in the neutrino survival and oscillation probabilities. Initial analysis of atmospheric neutrino data by the Super- Kamiokande collaboration is done using the vacuum oscillation hypothesis, which provided a good fit to the data. In this work, we did a study to differentiate the effects of vacuum oscillations and matter modified oscillations in the atmospheric neutrino data. We find that magnetized iron detector, ICAL at INO, can make a 3 sigma discrimination between vacuum oscillations and matter oscillations, for both normal and inverted hierarchies, in ten years.
We consider a solution of the atmospheric neutrino problem based on oscillations of muon neutrinos to sterile neutrinos: $ u_{mu}$ $leftrightarrow$ $ u_s$. The zenith angle ($Theta$) dependences of the neutrino and upward-going muon fluxes in presence of these oscillations are studied. The dependences have characteristic form with two dips: at $cos Theta = -0.6 div -0.2$ and $cos Theta = -1.0 div -0.8$. The latter dip is due to parametric resonance in oscillations of neutrinos which cross the core of the earth. A comparison of predictions with data from the MACRO, Baksan and Super-Kamiokande experiments is given.
The main goal of the IceCube Deep Core Array is to search for neutrinos of astrophysical origins. Atmospheric neutrinos are commonly considered as a background for these searches. We show here that cascade measurements in the Ice Cube Deep Core Array can provide strong evidence for tau neutrino appearance in atmospheric neutrino oscillations. A careful study of these tau neutrinos is crucial, since they constitute an irreducible background for astrophysical neutrino detection.
The Kamiokande II and IMB data on contained events induced by atmospheric neutrinos exhibit too low a ratio of muons to electrons, which has been interpreted as a possible indication of neutrino oscillations. At the same time, the recent data on upward--going muons in underground detectors have shown no evidence for neutrino oscillations, strongly limiting the allowed region of oscillation parameter space. In this paper we confront different types of neutrino oscillation hypotheses with the experimental results. The matter effects in $ u_mu leftrightarrow u_e$ and in $ u_mu leftrightarrow u_{sterile}$ oscillations are discussed and shown to affect significantly the upward--going muons.
New observations with atmospheric neutrinos from the underground experiments SuperKamiokande, Soudan 2, and MACRO, together with earlier results from Kamiokande and IMB, are reviewed. The most recent observations reconfirm aspects of atmospheric flavor content and of zenith angle distributions which appear anomalous in the context of null oscillations. The anomalous trends, exhibited with high statistics in both sub-GeV and multi-GeV data of the SuperKamiokande water Cherenkov experiment, occur also in event samples recorded by the tracking calorimeters. The data are well-described by disappearence of nu_mu flavor neutrinos arising in oscillations with dominant two-state mixing, for which there exists a parameter region allowed by all experiments. In a new analysis by SuperKamiokande, nu_mu -> nu_tau is favored over nu_mu -> nu_s as the dominant oscillation based upon absence of oscillation suppression from matter effects at high energies. The possibility for sub-dominant nu_mu -> nu_e oscillations in atmospheric neutrinos which arises with three-flavor mixing, is reviewed, and intriguing possibilities for amplification of this oscillation by terrestrial matter-induced resonances are discussed. Developments and future measurements which will enhance our knowledge of the atmospheric neutrino fluxes are briefly noted.
Motivated by the discovery hint of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs mass around 125 GeV at the LHC, we study the vacuum stability and perturbativity bounds on Higgs scalar of the SM extensions including neutrinos and dark matter (DM). Guided by the SM gauge symmetry and the minimal changes in the SM Higgs potential we consider two extensions of neutrino sector (Type-I and Type-III seesaw mechanisms) and DM sector (a real scalar singlet (darkon) and minimal dark matter (MDM)) respectively. The darkon contributes positively to the $beta$ function of the Higgs quartic coupling $lambda$ and can stabilize the SM vacuum up to high scale. Similar to the top quark in the SM we find the cause of instability is sensitive to the size of new Yukawa couplings between heavy neutrinos and Higgs boson, namely, the scale of seesaw mechanism. MDM and Type-III seesaw fermion triplet, two nontrivial representations of $SU(2)_{L}$ group, will bring the additional positive contributions to the gauge coupling $g_{2}$ renormalization group (RG) evolution and would also help to stabilize the electroweak vacuum up to high scale.