Tuesday 11 January 2022

Neutrino experiments point to new interactions, a sterile neutrino or lorentz violation

Neutrinos are behaving unusually again. Rahaman, Razaque and Sankar in a recent preprint . Review results from the T2K and Nova Experiments. They check three hypothesis,
  1. Non Unitary Three Neutrino Oscillations, i.e. a fourth sterile neutrino.
  2. Lorentz Invariance Violation, i.e. neutrinos not obeying relativity
  3. Non Standard Neutrino Interactions
In each case the standard model is disfavoured at 1 to 2 confidences levels, while the new physics is favoured at the same level. In there analysis present data is not enough to see which new physics is favoured. As they say, T2K and Nova continue to collect data, and new experiments such as DUNE, will help improve the tensions, and find which hypothesis is likely.