Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Twelve Neutrino Physics Predictions

Based mostly upon some of the latest papers from Daya Bay, Super-Kamiokande, Ice Cube, T2K, the Planck project, and MINOS, in addition to my overall reading on the subject, I make the following predictions:

1. The measured values of the known neutrino oscillation parameters (i.e. theta12, theta13, theta23, delta mass12 and delta mass23) are as accurate as they are claimed to be by existing, replicated experimental evidence.

2. Neutrinos have a normal mass hierarchy, not an inverted mass hierarchy. Thus, the lightest neutrino mass eigenstate is under 0.001eV, the middle neutrino mass eigenstate is roughly 0.008eV, and the heaviest neutrino mass eigenstate is roughly 0.051 eV.

3. The lightest neutrino mass eigenvalue is less than 1 meV and more than 0.01 meV. This puts all of the neutrino masses at roughly 10-10 times the corresponding charged lepton masses within a factor of ten or so.

4. The sum of the three neutrino masses is roughly 0.06 eV.

5. PMNS matrix theta23 is in the lower quadrant (i.e. between zero and 45 degrees, rather than between 45 degrees and 90 degrees) and is sine squared two theta rather than having maximal mixing at 45 degrees exactly equal to 1 is more like 0.95 (this would imply theta23 is about 38.5 degrees).

6. The CP violating phase of the PMNS matrix is in the range of 0.3pi to 0.6pi, and most likely close to 0.4pi. But, it is not exactly 0.5pi. The CP violating phase of the CKM matrix is about 0.38pi +/- 0.025pi. Going out on a limb, I will go further and predict that that CP violating phase of the PMNS matrix and the CKM matrix are identical.

7. There are no light sterile neutrinos, defining light as less than 10 eV (the cutoff for the lamdaCDM cosmology model definition of neutrinos).

8. There are no sterile neutrinos that are right handed versions of the "fertile" neutrinos (i.e. the electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino of the Standard Model), or otherwise oscillate or mix with the "fertile" neutrinos.

9. Neutrinos have Dirac mass, not Majorana mass, that arises in the same way that the masses of other the other Standard Model fermions do.

10. There are far more anti-neutrinos in the universe than there are ordinary neutrinos.

11. Neutrinoless double beta decay does not occur, nor do any other non-Standard Model types of lepton number non-conservation.

12. There are no superluminal neutrinos.

1 comment:

andrew said...

A new study claims to exclude CP violation of 0.15pi to 0.82pi in a normal hierarchy and a broader range including 0-1pi CP violation in an inverted hierarchy at the 90% confidence level.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01550

This would kill my prediction.