No Arabic abstract
There is a renewed interest in constraining the sum of the masses of the three neutrino flavours by using cosmological measurements. Solar, atmospheric, and reactor neutrino experiments have confirmed neutrino oscillations, implying that neutrinos have non-zero mass, but without pinning down their absolute masses. While it is established that the effect of light neutrinos on the evolution of cosmic structure is small, the upper limits derived from large-scale structure could help significantly to constrain the absolute scale of the neutrino masses. It is also important to know the sum of neutrino masses as it is degenerate with the values of other cosmological parameters, e.g. the amplitude of fluctuations and the primordial spectral index. A summary of cosmological neutrino mass limits is given. Current results from cosmology set an upper limit on the sum of the neutrino masses of ~1 eV, somewhat depending on the data sets used in the analyses and assumed priors on cosmological parameters. It is important to emphasize that the total neutrino mass (`hot dark matter) is derived assuming that the other components in the universe are baryons, cold dark matter and dark energy. We assess the impact of neutrino masses on the matter power spectrum, the cosmic microwave background, peculiar velocities and gravitational lensing. We also discuss future methods to improve the mass upper limits by an order of magnitude.
The absolute scale of neutrino masses is very important for understanding the evolution and the structure formation of the universe as well as for nuclear and particle physics beyond the present Standard Model. Complementary to deducing statements on the neutrino mass from cosmological observations two different methods to determine the neutrino mass scale in the laboratory are pursued: the search for neutrinoless double beta decay and the direct neutrino mass search. For both methods currently experiments with a sensitivity of order 100 meV are being set up or commissioned.
We present a new approach for generating tiny neutrino masses. The Dirac neutrino mass matrix gets contributions from two new Higgs doublets with their vevs at the electroweak (EW) scale. Neutrino masses are tiny not because of tiny Yukawa couplings, or very heavy ($sim 10^{14}textrm{GeV}$) right handed neutrinos. They are tiny because of a cancelation in the Dirac neutrino mass matrix (fine tuning). After fine tuning to make the Dirac neutrino mass matrix at the $10^{-4}$ GeV scale, light neutrino masses are obtained in the correct scale via the see-saw mechanism with the right handed neutrino at the EW scale. The proposal links neutrino physics to collider physics. The Higgs search strategy is completely altered. For a wide range of Higgs masses, the Standard Model Higgs decays dominantly to $ u_L N_R$ mode giving rise to the final state $bar{ u} u bar{b} b$, or $bar{ u} u tau^+tau^-$. This can be tested at the LHC, and possibly at the Tevatron.
An alternative to the conventional see-saw mechanism is proposed to explain the origin of small neutrino masses in supersymmetric theories. The masses and couplings of the right-handed neutrino field are suppressed by supersymmetry breaking, in a way similar to the suppression of the Higgs doublet mass, $mu$. New mechanisms for light Majorana, Dirac and sterile neutrinos arise, depending on the degree of suppression. Superpartner phenomenology is greatly altered by the presence of weak scale right-handed sneutrinos, which may have a coupling to a Higgs boson and a left-handed sneutrino. The sneutrino spectrum and couplings are quite unlike the conventional case - the lightest sneutrino can be the dark matter and predictions are given for event rates at upcoming halo dark matter direct detection experiments. Higgs decays and search strategies are changed. Copious Higgs production at hadron colliders can result from cascade decays of squarks and gluinos.
We demonstrate that Dirac neutrino masses in the experimentally preferred range are generated within supersymmetric gauge extensions of the Standard Model with a generalized supersymmetry breaking sector. If the usual superpotential Yukawa couplings are forbidden by the additional gauge symmetry (such as a U(1)), effective Dirac mass terms involving the wrong Higgs field can arise either at tree level due to hard supersymmetry breaking fermion Yukawa couplings, or at one-loop due to nonanalytic or nonholomorphic soft supersymmetry breaking trilinear scalar couplings. As both of these operators are naturally suppressed in generic models of supersymmetry breaking, the resulting neutrino masses are naturally in the sub-eV range. The neutrino magnetic and electric dipole moments resulting from the radiative mechanism also vanish at one-loop order.
In terms of its eigenvector decomposition, the neutrino mass matrix (in the basis where the charged lepton mass matrix is diagonal) can be understood as originating from a tribimaximal dominant structure with small deviations, as demanded by data. If neutrino masses originate from at least two different mechanisms, referred to as hybrid neutrino masses, the experimentally observed structure naturally emerges provided one mechanism accounts for the dominant tribimaximal structure while the other is responsible for the deviations. We demonstrate the feasibility of this picture in a fairly model-independent way by using lepton-number-violating effective operators, whose structure we assume becomes dictated by an underlying $A_4$ flavor symmetry. We show that if a second mechanism is at work, the requirement of generating a reactor angle within its experimental range always fixes the solar and atmospheric angles in agreement with data, in contrast to the case where the deviations are induced by next-to-leading order effective operators. We prove this idea is viable by constructing an $A_4$-based ultraviolet completion, where the dominant tribimaximal structure arises from the type-I seesaw while the subleading contribution is determined by either type-II or type-III seesaw driven by a non-trivial $A_4$ singlet (minimal hybrid model). After finding general criteria, we identify all the $mathbb{Z}_N$ symmetries capable of producing such $A_4$-based minimal hybrid models.