arXiv subjects

Silvia Pascoli

Publications and source records attributed to Silvia Pascoli.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

$Z^\prime$s in neutrino scattering at DUNE

Novel leptophilic neutral currents can be tested at upcoming neutrino oscillation experiments using two complementary processes, neutrino trident production and neutrino-electron ($ν-e$) elastic scattering. Considering generic anomaly-free $U(1)$ extensions of the Standard Model, we discuss the characteristics of $ν-e$ scattering as well as $e^+e^-$ and $μ^+μ^-$ trident production at the DUNE near detector in the presence of such BSM scenarios. We then determine the sensitivity of DUNE in constraining the well-known $L_e - L_μ$ and $L_μ- L_τ$ models. We conclude that DUNE will be able to probe these leptophilic models with unprecedented sensitivity, covering unproved explanations of the $(g-2)_μ$ discrepancy.

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arXiv2018

N-body simulations of structure formation in thermal inflation cosmologies

Thermal inflation models (which feature two inflationary stages) can display damped primordial curvature power spectra on small scales which generate damped matter fluctuations. For a reasonable choice of parameters, thermal inflation models naturally predict a suppression of the matter power spectrum on galactic and sub-galactic scales, mimicking the effect of warm or interacting dark matter. Matter power spectra in these models are also characterised by an excess of power (w.r.t. the standard $Λ$CDM power spectrum) just below the suppression scale. By running a suite of N-body simulations we investigate the non-linear growth of structure in models of thermal inflation. We measure the non-linear matter power spectrum and extract halo statistics, such as the halo mass function, and compare these quantities with those predicted in the standard $Λ$CDM model and in other models with damped matter fluctuations. We find that the thermal inflation models considered here produce measurable differences in the matter power spectrum from $Λ$CDM at redshifts $z>5$, while the halo mass functions are appreciably different at all redshifts. The halo mass function at $z=0$ for thermal inflation displays an enhancement of around $\sim 20\%$ w.r.t. $Λ$CDM and a damping at lower halo masses, with the position of the enhancement depending on the value of the free parameter in the model. The enhancement in the halo mass function (w.r.t. $Λ$CDM ) increases with redshift, reaching $\sim 40\%$ at $z=5$. We also study the accuracy of the analytical Press-Schechter approach, using different filters to smooth the density field, to predict halo statistics for thermal inflation. We find that the predictions with the smooth-$k$ filter agree with the simulation results over a wider range of halo masses than is the case with other filters commonly used in the literature.

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arXiv2018

$W^+ W^- H$ Production at Lepton Colliders: A New Hope for Heavy Neutral Leptons

We present the first study of the production of a Standard Model Higgs boson at a lepton collider in association with a pair of W bosons, $e^+_{} e^-_{} \to W^+_{} W^-_{} H$, in the inverse seesaw model. Taking into account all relevant experimental and theoretical constraints, we find sizable effects due to the additional heavy neutrinos up to -38% on the total cross-section at a center-of-mass energy of 3 TeV, and even up to -66% with suitable cuts. This motivates a detailed sensitivity analysis of the process $e^+_{} e^-_{} \to W^+_{} W^-_{} H$ as it could provide a new, very competitive experimental probe of low-scale neutrino mass models.

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arXiv2018

Safe Jet Vetoes

Central jet vetoes are powerful tools for reducing QCD background in measurements and searches for electroweak and colorless, new physics processes in hadron collisions. In this letter, we report the key findings of a new philosophy to designing searches for such phenomena at hadron colliders, one designed and centered around a dynamical jet veto instead a static veto applied independently of other selection criteria. Specifically, we investigate the theoretical and phenomenological consequences of setting the jet veto scale to the transverse momentum $(p_T)$ of the leading charged lepton $\ell$ in multi-lepton processes on an event-by-event basis. We consider the case of a TeV-scale heavy neutrino $N$ decaying to the trilepton final state and find the following: (i) Perturbative uncertainties associated with the veto greatly reduce due to tying the veto scale to the hard process scale. (ii) The signal efficiency for passing the veto jumps to $\gtrsim95\%$ and exhibits little-to-no dependence on the neutrino mass scale. (iii) Top quark and `fake' lepton rejection capabilities also improve compared to only vetoing heavy flavor-tagged jets above a fixed $p_T$. This results in an increased sensitivity to active-sterile neutrino mixing by approximately an order of magnitude over the LHC's lifetime. For a Dirac neutrino with mass $m_N = 150-1000$ GeV and the representative active-sterile mixing hypothesis $\vert V_{e4}\vert = \vert V_{τ4}\vert$ with $\vert V_{μ4}\vert=0$, we find that LHC experiments can probe $\vert V_{e4}\vert^2, \vert V_{τ4}\vert^2 \lesssim 6\times10^{-4} - 8\times10^{-3}$, surpassing the global upper limit for $m_N < 450$ GeV, with $\mathcal{L}=3$ ab$^{-1}$ of data at $\sqrt{s}=14$ TeV. Due to the color structures of the heavy $N$ production mechanisms considered, we argue that our results hold broadly for other color-singlet processes.

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arXiv2018

U(1)' mediated decays of heavy sterile neutrinos in MiniBooNE

The MiniBooNE low-energy excess is a longstanding problem which has received further confirmation recently with a reanalysis using newly collected data, with the anomaly now at the $4.8σ$ level. In this letter we propose a novel explanation which advocates a low-energy sector containing $Z^\prime$ bosons with GeV-scale masses and sterile neutrinos with masses around $100$-$500$ MeV. We show that this scenario can provide an excellent spectral agreement with the MiniBooNE low-energy excess in the form of $Z^\prime$-mediated neutral current production of heavy sterile states, a fraction of whose subsequent decay to $e^+e^-$ pairs are misidentified as single electron-like electromagnetic showers. Our model inscribes itself in the broad class of models in which sterile neutrinos are charged under novel interactions, allowing new couplings to hidden-sector physics. Alongside the electron-like MiniBooNE signature this model also predicts a novel, low-background, signal in LArTPC detectors such as MicroBooNE consisting of two distinguishable electron-like electromagnetic showers originating from a single vertex with no associated hadronic activity.

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arXiv2018

Nonlinear growth of structure in cosmologies with damped matter fluctuations

We investigate the nonlinear evolution of structure in variants of the standard cosmological model which display damped density fluctuations relative to cold dark matter (e.g. in which cold dark matter is replaced by warm or interacting DM). Using N-body simulations, we address the question of how much information is retained from different scales in the initial linear power spectrum following the nonlinear growth of structure. We run a suite of N-body simulations with different initial linear matter power spectra to show that, once the system undergoes nonlinear evolution, the shape of the linear power spectrum at high wavenumbers does not affect the non-linear power spectrum, while it still matters for the halo mass function. Indeed, we find that linear power spectra which differ from one another only at wavenumbers larger than their half-mode wavenumber give rise to (almost) identical nonlinear power spectra at late times, regardless of the fact that they originate from different models with damped fluctuations. On the other hand, the halo mass function is more sensitive to the form of the linear power spectrum. Exploiting this result, we propose a two parameter model of the transfer function in generic damped scenarios, and show that this parametrisation works as well as the standard three parameter models for the scales on which the linear spectrum is relevant.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Neutrino Trident Scattering at Near Detectors

Neutrino trident scattering is a rare Standard Model process where a charged-lepton pair is produced in neutrino-nucleus scattering. To date, only the dimuon final-state has been observed, with around 100 total events, while the other channels are as yet unexplored. In this work, we compute the trident production cross section by performing a complete four-body phase space calculation for different hadronic targets. This provides a correct estimate both of the coherent and the diffractive contributions to these cross sections, but also allows us to address certain inconsistencies in the literature related to the use of the Equivalent Photon Approximation in this context. We show that this approximation can give a reasonable estimate only for the production of dimuon final-states in coherent scattering, being inadmissible for all other cases considered. We provide estimates of the number and distribution of trident events at several current and future near detector facilities subjected to intense neutrino beams from accelerators: five liquid-argon detectors (SBND, $μ$BooNE, ICARUS, DUNE and $ν$STORM), the iron detector of T2K (INGRID) and three detectors made of composite material (MINOS, NO$ν$A and MINER$ν$A). We find that for many experiments, trident measurements are an attainable goal and a valuable addition to their near detector physics programme.

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arXiv2018

Implications of a Dark Matter-Neutrino Coupling at Hyper-Kamiokande

Dark matter and neutrinos provide the two most compelling pieces of evidence for new physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics but they are often treated as two different sectors. In this paper, we consider how neutrino observables can be used to constrain the parameter space of different models where active neutrinos interact with DM via mediators of different spins. We study for the first time the sensitivity of the Hyper-Kamiokande detector to neutrinos produced from MeV Dark Matter annihilation. In particular, we find that thermally produced DM candidates with masses between 15-30 MeV could be fully excluded.

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arXiv2018

A new smooth-$k$ space filter approach to calculate halo abundances

We propose a new filter, a smooth-$k$ space filter, to use in the Press-Schechter approach to model the dark matter halo mass function which overcomes shortcomings of other filters. We test this against the mass function measured in N-body simulations. We find that the commonly used sharp-$k$ filter fails to reproduce the behaviour of the halo mass function at low masses measured from simulations of models with a sharp truncation in the linear power spectrum. We show that the predictions with our new filter agree with the simulation results over a wider range of halo masses for both damped and undamped power spectra than is the case with the sharp-$k$ and real-space top-hat filters.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Baryogenesis via leptonic CP-violating phase transition

We propose a new mechanism to generate a lepton asymmetry based on the vacuum CP-violating phase transition (CPPT). This approach differs from classical thermal leptogenesis as a specific seesaw model, and its UV completion, need not be specified. The lepton asymmetry is generated via the dynamically realised coupling of the Weinberg operator during the phase transition. This mechanism provides a connection with low-energy neutrino observables.

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arXiv2017

The Effect of Thermal Velocities on Structure Formation in N-body Simulations of Warm Dark Matter

We investigate the impact of thermal velocities in N-body simulations of structure formation in warm dark matter models. Adopting the commonly used approach of adding thermal velocities, randomly selected from a Fermi-Dirac distribution, to the gravitationally-induced velocities of the simulation particles, we compare the matter and velocity power spectra measured from CDM and WDM simulations, in the latter case with and without thermal velocities. This prescription for adding thermal velocities introduces numerical noise into the initial conditions, which influences structure formation. At early times, the noise affects dramatically the power spectra measured from simulations with thermal velocities, with deviations of the order of $\sim \mathcal{O}(10)$ (in the matter power spectra) and of the order of $\sim \mathcal{O}(10^2)$ (in the velocity power spectra) compared to those extracted from simulations without thermal velocities. At late times, these effects are less pronounced with deviations of less than a few percent. Increasing the resolution of the N-body simulation shifts these discrepancies to higher wavenumbers. We also find that spurious haloes start to appear in simulations which include thermal velocities at a mass that is $\sim$3 times larger than in simulations without thermal velocities.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Dark matter-neutrino interactions through the lens of their cosmological implications

Dark matter and neutrinos provide the two most compelling pieces of evidence for new physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics but they are often treated as two different sectors. The aim of this paper is to determine whether there are viable particle physics frameworks in which dark matter can be coupled to active neutrinos. We use a simplified model approach to determine all possible renormalizable scenarios where there is such a coupling, and study their astrophysical and cosmological signatures. We find that dark matter-neutrino interactions have an impact on structure formation and lead to indirect detection signatures when the coupling between dark matter and neutrinos is sufficiently large. This can be used to exclude a large fraction of the parameter space. In most cases, dark matter masses up to a few MeV and mediator masses up to a few GeV are ruled out. The exclusion region can be further extended when dark matter is coupled to a spin-1 mediator or when the dark matter particle and the mediator are degenerate in mass if the mediator is a spin-0 or spin-1/2 particle.

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arXiv2017

Sensitivities and synergies of DUNE and T2HK

Long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, in particular Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) and Tokai to Hyper-Kamiokande (T2HK), will lead the effort in the precision determination of the as yet unknown parameters of the leptonic mixing matrix. In this article, we revisit the potential of DUNE, T2HK and their combination in light of the most recent experimental information. As well as addressing more conventional questions, we pay particular attention to the attainable precision on δ, which is playing an increasingly important role in the physics case of the long-baseline programme. We analyse the complementarity of the two designs, identify the benefit of a programme comprising distinct experiments and consider how best to optimise the global oscillation programme. This latter question is particularly pertinent in light of a number of alternative design options which have recently been mooted: a Korean second detector for T2HK and different beams options at DUNE. We study the impact of these options and quantify the synergies between alternative proposals, identifying the best means of furthering our knowledge of the fundamental physics of neutrino oscillation.

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arXiv2017

Light Sterile Neutrinos at $ν$STORM: Decoherence and CP violation

Light sterile neutrino oscillations can be partially or completely washed out at short-baseline experiments due to the breaking of neutrino production coherence. In this work we address this issue in sterile searches at $ν$STORM, an experimental proposal for a beam of neutrinos from the decay of stored muons. We work with 3+1 and 3+2 models, the latter introducing CP violation at short-baselines. We find that decoherence effects are only relevant for sterile masses above $Δm^2 \gtrsim 10$ eV$^2$, and that, even in that regime, we are able to place strong appearance bounds in such clean environments. In addition, the novel signatures of CP violation in the parameter space of interest can be identified with a significance of up to $\gtrsim 3 σ$.

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arXiv2017

Phenomenology of a Neutrino-DM Coupling: The Scalar Case

Dark matter (DM) and neutrinos are the two most compelling pieces of evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics but these are often treated as belonging to two different sectors. Yet DM-neutrino interactions are known to have cosmological consequences. Here, we study the scenario of a scalar DM candidate coupled to left-handed neutrinos via a Dirac mediator. We determine the mass of a DM candidate that yields the right DM relic abundance in a thermal scenario and it is consistent with large-scale structure formation. In order to satisfy both constraints, a complex DM candidate should have a mass larger than $8.14$ keV while the mass of a real DM candidate should be above $18.1$ eV, independently of the value of the DM-neutrino coupling.

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arXiv2017

Creating the Baryon Asymmetry from Lepto-Bubbles

We propose a new mechanism of baryogenesis which proceeds via a CP-violating phase transition. During this phase transition, the coupling of the Weinberg operator is dynamically realised and subsequently a lepton asymmetry is generated via the non-zero interference of this operator at different times. This new scenario of leptogenesis provides a direct connection between the baryon asymmetry, low energy neutrino parameters and leptonic flavour models.

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arXiv2016

Precision neutrino experiments vs the Littlest Seesaw

We study to what extent upcoming precision neutrino oscillation experiments will be able to exclude one of the most predictive models of neutrino mass and mixing: the Littlest Seesaw. We show that this model provides a good fit to current data, predicting eight observables from two input parameters, and provide new assessments of its predictions and their correlations. We then assess the ability to exclude this model using simulations of upcoming neutrino oscillation experiments including the medium-distance reactor experiments JUNO and RENO-50 and the long-baseline accelerator experiments DUNE and T2HK. We find that an accurate determination of the currently least well measured parameters, namely the atmospheric and solar angles and the CP phase $δ$, provide crucial independent tests of the model. For $θ_{13}$ and the two mass-squared differences, however, the model's exclusion requires a combination of measurements coming from a varied experimental programme. Our results show that the synergy and complementarity of future experiments will play a vital role in efficiently discriminating between predictive models of neutrino flavour, and hence, towards advancing our understanding of neutrino oscillations in the context of the flavour puzzle of the Standard Model.

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arXiv2016

Theoretical motivations for precision measurements of oscillation parameters

We discuss two theoretical motivations of precision measurements of oscillation parameters. One is the guidance for flavour model building with flavour symmetries, and the other is the connection with the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry. We also present our recent progress in these aspects, a new approach of flavour model building based on cross coupling in the flavon potential and a novel mechanism of leptogenesis via phase transition.

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