Search

The common lore in the literature of neutrino mass generation is that the canonical seesaw mechanism beautifully offers an explanation for the tiny neutrino mass but at the cost of introducing right-handed neutrinos at a scale that is out of range for the current experiments. The inverse seesaw mechanism is an interesting alternative to the canonical one once it leads to tiny neutrino masses with the advantage of being testable at the TeV scale. However, this last mechanism suffers from an issue of naturalness concerning the scale responsible for such small masses, namely, the parameter μ that is related to lepton number violation and is supposed to be at the keV scale, much lower than the electroweak one. However, no theoretical framework was built that offers an explanation for obtaining this specific scale. In this work, we propose a variation of the inverse seesaw mechanism by assuming a minimal scalar and fermionic set of singlet fields, along with a Z5 ⊗ Z2 symmetry, that allows a dynamical explanation for the smallness of μ, recovering the neat canonical seesaw formula and with right-handed (RH) neutrinos tree to be at the electroweak scale, thus testable at LHC and current neutrino experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the problem of neutrino oscillations via a fermionic particle detector model inspired by the physics of the Fermi theory of weak interactions. The model naturally leads to a description of emission and absorption of neutrinos in terms of localized two-level systems. By explicitly including source and detector as part of the dynamics, the formalism is shown to recover the standard results for neutrino oscillations without mention to "flavor states," which are ill defined in quantum field theory. This illustrates how particle detector models provide a powerful theoretical tool to approach the measurement issue in quantum field theory and emphasizes that the notion of flavor states, although sometimes useful, must not play any crucial role in neutrino phenomenology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a longstanding desire of cosmologists, and particle physicists as well, to connect inflation to low energy physics, culminating, for instance, in what is known as Higgs inflation. The condition for the standard Higgs boson playing the role of the inflaton, and driving sucessfully inflation, is that it couples nonminimally with gravity. Nevertheless, cosmological constraints impose that the nonminimal coupling be large. This causes the loss of perturbative unitarity in a scale of energy far below the Planck one. Our aim in this work is to point out that inflaton potential containing a particular type of trilinear coupling involving the inflaton may circumvent this problem by realizing Higgs inflation with tiny nonminimal coupling of the inflaton with gravity. We then develop the idea within a toy model and implement it in the inverse type-II seesaw mechanism for small neutrinos masses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The minimal 3-3-1 model is perturbative until energies around 4-5 TeV, posing a challenge to generate neutrino masses at eV scale, mainly if one aims to take advantage of the seesaw mechanism. As a means to circumvent this problem, we propose a modification of the model such that it accommodates the type I and type II seesaw mechanisms altogether. We show that the conjunction of both mechanisms yield a neutrino mass expression suppressed by a high power of the cutoff scale, M5, in its denominator. With such a suppression term, we naturally obtain neutrino masses at eV scale when M is around few TeV. We also investigate the size of lepton flavor violation through the process µ → ey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]