Conveners
Parallel: Beta Decay Searches & Coherent Neutrino Scattering I
- Kate Scholberg (Duke University)
Parallel: Beyond the Standard Model Searches I
- Amy Nicholson (UNC Chapel Hill)
Parallel: Beyond the Standard Model Searches II
- Vincente Guiseppe (ORNL)
Parallel: Coherent Neutrino Scattering II
- Diane Markoff (NC Central University and TUNL)
Parallel: Double-Beta Decay I
- Matthew Green (NCSU)
Parallel: Dark Matter Searches I
- Reyco Henning
Parallel: Dark Matter Searches II
- Jason Newby (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Parallel: Double-Beta Decay II
- Julieta Gruszko (UNC Chapel Hill)
Parallel: Double-Beta Decay III
- Diane Markoff (NC Central University and TUNL)
Parallel: Dark Matter & Beyond the Standard Model Searches III
- Rex Tayloe (Indiana University)
Parallel: Double Beta Decay IV & Neutrino/DM Instrumentation I
- Micah Buuck (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
Parallel: Beyond the Standard Model Searches IV
- Elizabeth Worcester (Brookhaven National Lab)
Parallel: Neutrino/DM Instrumentation II
- Vincente Guiseppe (ORNL)
Parallel: Solar and Supernova Neutrinos & Flavor Transformation I
- Mary Kidd (Tennessee Technological University)
Parallel: Neutrino/DM Instrumentation III & Neutrino Scattering I
- David Radford (ORNL)
Parallel: Solar and Supernova Neutrinos & Flavor Transformation II
- Raquel Castillo
Parallel: Beyond the Standard Model Searches V, Solar and Supernova Neutrinos, & Cosmology
- Zoya Vallari (Caltech)
Parallel: Dark Matter Searches IV & Neutrino Scattering II
- Brian Lenardo (Stanford University)
Neutrino sources with energy of $\mathcal{O}(10$ MeV) are an invaluable tool for studying neutrino interactions with nuclei - previously enabling the first measurement of coherent elastic scattering. Neutrinos (and potentially dark matter) in this energy range will also excite nuclei, giving us another physics channel to study. In this work we consider the inelastic nuclear scattering of...
Project 8 is a tritium endpoint neutrino mass experiment utilizing a phased program to achieve sensitivity to the full range of neutrino masses allowed by the inverted mass hierarchy. The Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES) technique is employed to measure the differential energy spectrum of relativistic decay electrons with high precision. In this talk, I will present the recent...
We consider BSM models in which neutrinos couple to Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs). In these models, an incoming flux of atmospheric neutrinos can scatter off of nuclei in the Earth, producing a flux of HNLs (upscattering) with energies ranging from O(10 MeV) to O(10 GeV). If an HNL decays within a neutrino detector, it can produce a visible signal, appearing as an excess of neutrino...
Tritium has been the isotope of choice for measurements of the neutrino mass and planned detection of the relic neutrino background. The low mass of 3-H leads to large recoil energy of the nucleus. This has emerged as a limiting factor for both measurements. We propose to use 241-Pu as an alternative. The recoil is 80x smaller and it has similar decay energy and lifetime as 3-H. We evaluate...
The Coherent Neutrino-Nucleus Interaction Experiment (CONNIE) aims to detect the coherent elastic scattering of reactor antineutrinos (CEvNS) using fully depleted high-resistivity charge coupled devices (CCDs). The detector is located at a distance of 30 m from the core of the 3.8 GW Angra-2 nuclear reactor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With an active mass of 50 g, a readout noise better than 2...
MicroBooNE is an 85-tonne active mass liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) at Fermilab. It has excellent calorimetric, spatial and energy resolution and is exposed to two neutrino beams, which make it a powerful detector not just for neutrino physics, but also for Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics. The experiment has competitive sensitivity to heavy neutral leptons possibly...
The observation of neutrinoless double beta decay would have far-reaching consequences for particle physics, as it would be a clear manifestation of lepton number violation and it would give a hint on the origin of neutrino masses. While searching for neutrinoless double beta decay, a significant amount of the two-neutrino double beta decay data has been collected by a number of experiments....
Coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CEvNS) is a well-predicted Standard Model process only recently observed for the first time. Its precise study could reveal non-standard neutrino properties and open a window to search for physics beyond the Standard Model.
NUCLEUS is a CEvNS experiment conceived for the detection of neutrinos from nuclear reactors with unprecedented precision at...
The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) is the first bolometric 0νββ experiment to reach the one-tonne mass scale. The detector, located underground at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, consists of 988 TeO2 crystals arranged in a compact cylindrical structure of 19 towers, operating at a base temperature of about 10 mK. After beginning its first physics...
The COHERENT collaboration operates an array of detectors at the ORNL Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) to measure coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering (CEvNS) and to search for dark matter. The 1.4 MW SNS pulsed proton beam produces an intense neutrino flux and may be producing dark matter particles. Our low-energy-threshould detectors sited in the low-background "Neutrino Alley"...
With its excellent energy resolution and ultra-low backgrounds, the high-purity germanium detectors in the Majorana Demonstrator enable several searches for beyond the Standard Model physics ranging from the primary neutrinoless double beta decay search to searches for several classes of exotic dark matter models. Many of these dark matter models predict a peaked signature in an energy...
In the presence of transition magnetic moments between active and sterile neutrinos, the search for a Primakoff upscattering process at Coherent Elastic Neutrino Nucleus Scattering (CEvNS) experiments provide stringent constraints on the neutrino magnetic moment. We show that a radiative upscattering process with a photon emitted in the final state can provide a novel experimental mode to...
Relativistic protons and electrons in the extremely powerful jets of blazars may boost via elastic collisions the dark matter particles in the surroundings of the source to high energies. The blazar-boosted dark matter flux at Earth may be sizeable, larger than the flux associated with the analogous process of DM boosted by galactic cosmic rays, and relevant to access direct detection for dark...
We discuss neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) mediated by the lightest neutralino of arbitrary mass in the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) under the presence of R-parity violating trilinear interactions. In this scenario, the exchange of the lightest neutralino can result in $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay of either long-range or short-range behaviour, depending on the...
There are several complementary searches for dark matter interacting with nuclei including underground direct detection experiments that use heavy nuclei, spherical detectors that make use of light nuclei, and cosmological probes that directly constrain dark matter-proton interactions. For dark matter with a mass $m_\chi > O(1)$ GeV, i.e., a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), the...
Next-generation searches for neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay plan to make use of several isotopes, including 76Ge, 100Mo, and 136Xe. We explore the effects of observations in multiple isotopes on the joint inference of the standard mass mechanism (light neutrino exchange) and an exotic short-range 0νββ mechanism. We also study the role that uncertainties in the nuclear matrix elements...
Nuclear matrix elements (NME) for neutrinoless double beta decays (DBDs) are required for neutrino studies beyond the standard model, and experimental information on the NMEs are crucial for phenomenological model evaluations for the NMEs. Spin dipole (SD) components are one of major ones of the NME. The SD giant resonance energy and the SD strength in the intermediate nucleus have been...
A precise understanding of WIMP discovery limits is indeed required for a correct interpretation of forthcoming data from multi-ton dark matter direct detection experiments. In this talk we will reconsider the discovery limit of multi-ton direct detection dark matter experiments in the light of recent measurements of the coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering process by the COHERENT...
Despite great efforts to directly detect dark matter (DM), experiments so far have found no evidence. The sensitivity of direct detection of DM approaches the so-called neutrino floor below which it is hard to disentangle the DM candidate from the background neutrino. One of the promising methods of overcoming this barrier is to utilize the directional signature that both neutrino- and...
The ${\rm M{\small AJORANA}~D{\small EMONSTRATOR}}$ is searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) in $^{76}$Ge, a beyond the standard model process that would prove the neutrino is a Majorana fermion if discovered.
The experiment has completed operation of a modular array of 44 kg of high purity germanium detectors, in the p-type point contact (PPC), inverted-coaxial...
The GERDA experiment searched for the lepton-number-violating neutrinoless double-beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) of $^{76}$Ge. The discovery of the $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay would have profound implications for particle physics and cosmology. By operating high-purity germanium (HPGe) detectors enriched in $^{76}$Ge immersed in liquid argon (LAr), the GERDA experiment achieved one of the most...
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment is a world-leading dark matter direct detector, which, in its full data-taking period of 1000 live days, will be sensitive to a spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section of 1.4 x 10^-48 cm^2 (for a 40 GeV WIMP), and will have the ability to detect other rare processes. The experiment has an active mass of 7 tonnes of xenon, is located at the Sanford Underground...
Though widely accepted as the best explanation for many astrophysical and cosmological observations, Dark Matter particles have yet to be directly observed in a terrestrial detector. The XENON collaboration has long pioneered developments both in the general field of liquid xenon time projection chambers and in world leading searches for Dark Matter. Our collaboration has published world...
SNO+ is a large-scale multi-purpose neutrino detector, located 2 km underground at SNOLAB, Canada. The primary aim of the experiment is to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay (0νββ), along with a variety of other physics programs including detection of solar, reactor, and supernova neutrinos, measuring the geoneutrino flux, and searching for invisible nucleon decay. The experiment has...
AMoRE (Advanced Mo-based Rare process Experiment) is an international collaboration aiming to search for the neutrinoless double beta (0n bb) decay of 100Mo using molybdate scintillating crystals with metallic magnetic calorimeters as low-temperature sensors. The data of the second phase experiment, AMoRE-I, with ~3 kg of 100Mo in the scintillating crystals, can be used to search for 0n bb...
The DAMIC experiment at SNOLAB uses thick, fully-depleted, scientific
grade charge-coupled devices (CCDs) to search for the interactions
between proposed dark matter particles in the galactic halo and the
ordinary silicon atoms in the detector. DAMIC CCDs operate with an
extremely low instrument noise and dark current, making them
particularly sensitive to ionization signals expected from...
In the past decades, numerous experiments have emerged to unveil the nature of dark matter (DM), one of the most discussed open questions in modern particle physics. Among them, the CRESST-III experiment, located at LNGS, operates scintillating crystals as cryogenic phonon detectors and reaches by that one of the strongest exclusion limits on the DM-nucleon interaction cross section, in the...
The NEXT experiment searches for Majorana neutrinos through neutrinoless double beta decay (0𝜈𝛽𝛽) using a high pressure gaseous xenon time projection chamber. This technology offers excellent energy resolution and tracking capabilities, providing a competitive option for the tonne scale level necessary to fully cover the Majorana mass range corresponding to the inverted hierarchy of neutrino...
In recent years xenon-based dark matter direct detection experiments have reached large enough target masses and low enough background levels to additionally probe rare double beta decays. Among these decays are the two-neutrino double electron capture ($2\nu$ECEC) of $^{124}$Xe as well as the hypothetical neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) of $^{136}$Xe. An observation of...
Most terrestrial Dark Matter searches employ Direct Detection by looking for recoils from elastic scattering of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. However, if the weakly interacting Dark Matter particles exist and interact with ordinary matter, such a WIMP-Baryon interaction may disintegrate both the WIMP and the baryon nucleus in the process. Such an event would send out gamma-rays and...
The existing 4 sigma discrepancy between the neutron lifetime measurements in bottle versus beam experiments has been interpreted as a sign of neutrons decaying to dark particles with a 1% branching fraction. I will present a brief summary of this proposal, including particle physics models accommodating this scenario, as well as discuss related theoretical and experimental follow-ups. I will...
nEXO aims to utilize 5 tonnes of enriched xenon to search for $^{136}$Xe neutrinoless double beta decay, with a 90% CL half-life sensitivity of 1.35 x 10$^{28}$ yr. To reach this half-life sensitivity, which covers the parameter space associated with the inverted neutrino mass ordering, many improvements have been made towards understanding the production and reconstruction of light and charge...
Experimental hints for lepton-flavor universality violation in the muon's magnetic moment as well as neutral- and charged-current B-meson decays require Standard-Model extensions by particles such as leptoquarks that generically lead to unacceptably fast rates of charged lepton flavor violation and proton decay. We propose a model based on a gauged U(1)(Lμ−Lτ) that eliminates all these...
The LEGEND Collaboration pursues a staged experimental program to discover the
neutrinoless double-beta decay of the isotope $^{76}$Ge. The discovery-oriented design of LEGEND relies on Ge detectors and liquid argon scintillation to perform an essentially background-free measurement. The first stage of the project, LEGEND-200, is currently under preparation at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in...
Excited states in the isotope 136Cs are of interest both as intermediate states in the double beta decay of 136Xe and as final-state products in neutrino charged-current interactions in next-generation liquid-xenon-based particle physics experiments. In the latter case, the presence of long-lived isomeric states may enable background-free detection of solar neutrinos with sensitivity down to...
The Muon $g-2$ experiment at Fermilab has recently announced its measurement of the muon anomalous magnetic moment (AMM), which is in complete agreement with the long-standing tension previously reported by BNL. In addition, recent precise measurement of the fine-structure constant at Berkeley Lab shows somewhat disagreement with the electron AMM. Besides, evidence
for lepton flavor...
SND@LHC is a compact and stand-alone experiment to perform measurements with neutrinos produced at the LHC in a hitherto unexplored pseudo-rapidity region of 7.2 < 𝜂 < 8.6, complementary to all the other experiments at the LHC. The experiment is to be located 480 m downstream of IP1 in the unused TI18 tunnel. The detector is composed of a hybrid system based on an 800 kg target mass of...
Sterile neutrinos with keV-scale masses are popular candidates for warm dark matter. In the most straightforward case they are produced via oscillations with active neutrinos. We introduce effective self-interactions of active neutrinos and investigate the effect on the parameter space of sterile neutrino mass and mixing. Our focus is on mixing with electron neutrinos, which is subject to...
The CYGNO project aims to develop a gaseous high precision Time Projection Chamber with an optical readout for directional Dark Matter searches and solar neutrino spectroscopy at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. CYGNO (a CYGNus TPC with Optical readout ) is part of the CYGNUS proto-collaboration, which aims to develop, at an international level, a Galactic Nuclear Recoil Observatory, a ton...
The Baksan Experiment on Sterile Transitions (BEST) probes the gallium anomaly and its possible connections to oscillations between active and sterile neutrinos. Based on the Gallium-Germanium Neutrino Telescope (GGNT) technology of the SAGE experiment, the BEST setup is comprised of two zones of liquid Ga metal target to explore neutrino oscillations on the meter scale. Any deficits in the...
The search for sterile neutrinos is among the brightest possibilities in our quest for understanding the microscopic nature of dark matter in our universe. These “mostly sterile” flavors are expected to be accompanied by heavy mass states, and thus their existence can be probed via momentum conservation with SM particles in radioactive decay. One way to observe these momentum recoil effects...
The Oscura experiment will deploy a very-large array of novel silicon skipper Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) to search for low-mass dark matter (DM). Skipper-CCDs deliver sub-electron readout noise for millions of pixels, providing an ideal detector for low-threshold rare event searches for DM-electron interactions and coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. The Oscura instrument will...
There have been several searches for new particles that can take place using experiments involving protons on target. Axions searches originated as a solution to the strong CP problem in particle physics and later a solution to explain dark matter. Theoretical bosons have also been proposed as an explanation for anomalies such as the X-17 anomaly. Using the IsoDAR neutrino experiment, we show...
The origin of the relatively high solar system abundances of certain proton-rich isotopes in the $90 < A < 100$ mass range has been an enduring mystery in nuclear astrophysics. An attractive proposal to solve this problem is called the $\nu p$-process. This process could operate in a hot bubble of a core-collapse supernova, which is formed by a neutrino-driven outflow from the surface of the...
Non-zero rest masses give rise to neutrino flavor oscillations. In addition to the vacuum potential, flavor oscillations depend on the presence of in-medium weakly-interacting particles, including other neutrinos. Within a mean-field treatment of flavor transformation in dense astrophysics environments, this neutrino-neutrino self-interaction term can produce non-linear behavior in the...
MadDM is an automated numerical tool for the computation of dark-matter observables for generic new physics models based on the Monte Carlo generator MadGraph5_aMC@NLO. Notably, the code provides a comprehensive framework for the reinterpretation of direct and indirect detection searches. For instance, it allows the user to compute the fully differential nuclear recoil rates as well as the...
We are developing cryogenic single-crystal detectors with magnetic quantum sensors for sub-GeV DM and CEvNS detection. Magnetic quantum sensors deposited on crystal surfaces provide fast and efficient athermal-phonon collection, which could enable phonon-pulse shape discrimination (PPSD) of electron and nuclear recoil (ER and NR) signals for active background rejection in DM search and CEvNS...
Neutrino flavor transformation is expected to significantly change the nucleosynthetic output and thus electromagnetic signature of neutron star mergers. However, merger simulations do not currently account for flavor transformation self-consistently, and there is not enough information in the common moment method for radiation transport to definitively determine the presence or results of...
The development of low-threshold detectors for the study of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering and for the search for light dark matter calls for new calibration methods at sub-keV energies. We suggest this can be provided by the nuclear recoils resulting from the gamma emission following thermal neutron capture [1]. In particular, several MeV-scale single-gamma transitions induce...
Supernova simulations are yet to reliably account for collective neutrino oscillations. I’ll give an overview of all the ways that collisional processes are, or have been claimed to be, relevant to oscillation outcomes. Special emphasis will be placed on collisional instabilities, a newly discovered class of phenomena that might cause flavor transformation deep inside supernovae.
Neutrinos in compact-object environments, such as core-collapse supernovae, can experience various kinds of collective effects in flavor space, engendered by neutrino-neutrino interactions. These include "bipolar" collective oscillations, which are exhibited by neutrino ensembles where different flavors dominate at different energies. Considering the importance of neutrinos in the dynamics and...
Particle detectors based on liquid nobles, such as liquid argon (LAr), often require surfaces that shift the short vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) scintillation light towards the visible range and then reflect it. For the LAr instrumentation of the LEGEND-200 neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment, the wavelength shifter tetraphenyl butadiene (TPB) was in-situ evaporated on 14m2 of the reflector...
We will present the status of Ge crystal growth and detector development at University of South Dakota. The detector development including Ge internal charge amplification, Ge ionization detector in a cryo mode, thin Ge detectors, and ring-contact Ge detectors will be reported. The physics motivation, the technical challenges, and the current status of the detector development will be...
Neutrinos can experience collective flavor oscillations in core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) and binary neutron star mergers (BNSMs) where they are copiously produced. Collective oscillations can spawn spontaneously in a dense neutrino gas and propagate in the form of flavor isospin waves. Although not well understood, this novel phenomenon can have various important ramifications in the...
Using the relativistic mean field (RMF) model, we present the neutrino interaction with the constituents of matter, considering the neutrino form factors that are obtained from the experiments and astrophysical constraints with the medium modifications of nucleon form factors. The effect of the constraint neutrino form factors and medium modification to the neutrino mean free path will be...
MicroBooNE is a liquid argon time projection chamber that operates in the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab. The detector provides high-resolution imaging of neutrino interactions with a low threshold and full angular coverage. Thanks to a high event rate and several years of continuous operation, the MicroBooNE collaboration has obtained the world's largest dataset of neutrino-argon...
The MicroBooNE collaboration recently released a series of measurements aimed at investigating the nature of the excess of low energy electromagnetic interactions observed by the MiniBooNE collaboration. In this talk, we will present the latest results from both a search of single photons in MicroBooNE, as well as a series of three independent analyses leveraging different reconstruction...
Potassium-40 (40K) is a naturally-occurring radioactive isotope. It is a background in rare-event searches, plays a role in geochronology, and has a nuclear structure of interest to theorists. This radionuclide decays mainly by beta emission to calcium, and by electron-capture to an excited state of argon. The electron-capture decay of 40K directly to the ground state of argon has never been...
Solar neutrinos are unique probes for studying the Sun. The Borexino experiment uses organic liquid scintillator as detection material. Thanks to the reached unprecedented levels of radio-purity, Borexino measured neutrinos from the pp chain and CNO cycle. Currently, the recent solar model predictions prefer low metal abundances which are, however, in tension with helioseismology...
A vast body of astrophysical and cosmological observations point at the existence of an abundant form of matter interacting almost exclusively through gravity. A leading dark matter candidate is a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP, a thermal relic of the Big Bang, which has a sub-electroweak-scale self-annihilation cross section and a mass in the TeV/c$^2$-range. The motion of...
The stable iodine and caesium isotopes are the primary constituents of the
CsI[Na] neutrino detector operational from 2015 to 2019 at the SNS. Theoretically
computed cross sections for these nuclei are therefore of considerable
interest. The goal of the research outlined in this abstract was to obtain accurate
theoretical scattering cross sections along with nuclear de-excitation data
for...
Supernovae neutrinos serve as a direct probe of stellar interiors under extreme conditions. These neutrinos carry information important to open questions such as: the supernovae shock breakout mechanism, the stiffness of the nuclear equation of state, neutrino oscillation parameters and mass hierarchy, and much more. The next galactic supernova could produce hundreds to thousands of neutrino...
Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) both probe physics of the early universe. BBN is the intersection of nuclear astrophysics and early-universe cosmology, explaining the cosmic origin of the lightest elements, such as $^4$He and deuterium. Having precisely measured nuclear data as input, BBN predictions depend on the cosmic baryon-to-photon ratio $\eta =...
Next generation neutrino oscillation experiments are transitioning from discovery to an era of precision. With this change, precise cross sections are a necessity to maximize the potential physics reach of these experiments. The nucleon axial form factor is a vital ingredient in the nucleon amplitudes used to predict quasielastic scattering, the primary signal measurement process for DUNE,...
