Upper limits on neutrino masses from cosmology have been reported recently to reach the impressive sub-eV level, which is competitive with future terrestrial neutrino experiments. In this brief overview of the latest limits from cosmology I point out some of the caveats that should be borne in mind when interpreting the significance of these limits.
Upper limits on neutrino masses from cosmology have been reported recently to reach the impressive sub-eV level, which is competitive with future terrestrial neutrino experiments. In this brief review of the latest limits from cosmology we point out some of the caveats that should be borne in mind when interpreting the significance of these limits.
Here we give a brief review on the current bounds on the general Majorana transition neutrino magnetic moments (TNMM) which cover also the conventional neutrino magnetic moments (NMM). Leptonic CP phases play a key role in constraining TNMMs. While the Borexino experiment is the most sensitive to the TNMM magnitudes, one needs complementary information from reactor and accelerator experiments in order to probe the complex CP phases.
We study the effects induced by excited leptons on the leptonic tau decay at one loop level. Using a general effective lagrangian approach to describe the couplings of the excited leptons, we compute their contributions to the leptonic decays and use the current experimental values of the branching ratios to put limits on the mass of excited states and the substructure scale.
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.
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.