arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Olga Mena Requejo.
High-energy neutrinos may resonate with relic background neutralinos to form short-lived sneutrinos. In some circumstances, the decay chain that leads back to the lightest supersymmetric particle would yield few-GeV gamma rays or charged-particle signals. Although resonant coannihilation would occur at an appreciable rate in our galaxy, the signal in any foreseeable detector is unobservably small.
In an undulant universe, cosmic expansion is characterized by alternating periods of acceleration and deceleration. We examine cosmologies in which the dark-energy equation of state varies periodically with the number of e-foldings of the scale factor of the universe, and use observations to constrain the frequency of oscillation. We find a tension between a forceful response to the cosmic coincidence problem and the standard treatment of structure formation.
Establishing the neutrino mass hierarchy is one of the fundamental questions that will have to be addressed in the next future. Its determination could be obtained with long-baseline experiments but typically suffers from degeneracies with other neutrino parameters. We consider here the NOvA experiment configuration and propose to place a second off-axis detector, with a shorter baseline, such that, by exploiting matter effects, the type of neutrino mass hierarchy could be determined with only the neutrino run. We show that the determination of this parameter is free of degeneracies, provided the ratio L/E, where L the baseline and E is the neutrino energy, is the same for both detectors.
Annihilation of extremely energetic cosmic neutrinos on the relic-neutrino background can give rise to absorption lines at energies corresponding to formation of the electroweak gauge boson $Z^{0}$. The positions of the absorption dips are set by the masses of the relic neutrinos. Suitably intense sources of extremely energetic ($10^{21}$ -- $10^{25}$-eV) cosmic neutrinos might therefore enable the determination of the absolute neutrino masses and the flavor composition of the mass eigenstates. Several factors--other than neutrino mass and composition--distort the absorption lines, however. We analyze the influence of the time-evolution of the relic-neutrino density and the consequences of neutrino decay. We consider the sensitivity of the lineshape to the age and character of extremely energetic neutrino sources, and to the thermal history of the Universe, reflected in the expansion rate. We take into account Fermi motion arising from the thermal distribution of the relic-neutrino gas. We also note the implications of Dirac vs. Majorana relics, and briefly consider unconventional neutrino histories. We ask what kinds of external information would enhance the potential of cosmic-neutrino absorption spectroscopy, and estimate the sensitivity required to make the technique a reality.