Neutrino Oscillations in Gallium and Reactor Experiments and Cosmological Effects of a Light Sterile Neutrino Mario Acero O
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Neutrino oscillations in Gallium and reactor experiments and cosmological effects of a light sterile neutrino Mario Acero O To cite this version: Mario Acero O. Neutrino oscillations in Gallium and reactor experiments and cosmological effects of a light sterile neutrino. High Energy Physics - Phenomenology. Universit`adegli studi di Torino; Universit´ede Savoie, 2009. English. <tel-01045108> HAL Id: tel-01045108 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01045108 Submitted on 4 Aug 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destin´eeau d´ep^otet `ala diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publi´esou non, lished or not. The documents may come from ´emanant des ´etablissements d'enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche fran¸caisou ´etrangers,des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou priv´es. Universita` degli Studi di Torino Facolta´ di Scienze Matematiche Fisiche e Naturali Dipartimento di Fisica Teorica Universite´ de Savoie Ecole´ Doctorale - DCT Physique Theorique´ Dottorato di Ricerca in Fisica Fondamentale, Applicata ed Astrofisica CICLO XXI NEUTRINO OSCILLATIONS IN GALLIUM AND REACTOR EXPERIMENTS AND COSMOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF A LIGHT STERILE NEUTRINO Tesi prsentata da Mario Andr´es Acero Ortega Relatore: Dott. Carlo Giunti co-Relatore: Dott. Julien Lesgourgues Contro Relatori: Dott. Thomas Schwetz Dott. Sergio Pastor Coordinatore del Dottorato: Prof. Stefano Sciuto Anni Accademici: 2005 - 2008 Settore Scientifico-Disciplinare di Afferenza: FIS/02, FIS/05 “Try to imagine a spaceship that could pass right through the Earth without even noticing it was there; a spaceship that could cross the vastness of the space at the speed of light, and then penetrate into the very heart of subatomic matter to seek out its fundamental structure. Imagine, then, a particle that is almost nothing that can tell you almost everything about the structure of the matter and the evolution of the Universe. Impossible?.” From: Spaceship neutrino, by Christine Sutton. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1992) Publication type: Doctoral thesis. Author: Mario Andr´es Acero Ortega. Neutrino oscillations in Gallium and reactor experiments Title: and cosmological effects of a light sterile neutrino. Department: University of Turin, Theoretical Physics Department. Professor Carlo Giunti (INFN and U. Torino) and Advisors: Professor Julien Lesgourgues (PH-TH CERN and EPFL). Professor Sergio Pastor (U. Valencia, IFIC.) and Opponents: Professor Thomas Schwetz (MPI Heildelberg). Defense: January 27, 2009. Keywords: neutrino oscillations, sterile neutrino, neutrino cosmology. ArXiv: xxxx.xxxx Copyright c 2009 – Mario Andr´es Acero Ortega ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First of all, I thank my two advisors, Carlo Giunti and Julien Lesgourgues. Without them, this work would have not been possible. They really were guides for me during the last three years, they were very close to me and to the progress of my (our) work. I thank them for all their help, interest, patient and comprehension during the time I worked with them. They were much closer to me than I was expecting and it made me work much better and more confident. They were great Professors to me and I am very grateful for this. Many thanks to Marco Laveder, who encouraged and helped me to complete an important part of my work. Also to Sergio Pastor and Thomas Schwetz, for taking part in the evaluation of this Thesis, as well as for their stimulant comments and suggestions. My acknowledgments also to the Universit`adi Torino, the International Doctorate of AstroParticle Physics (IDAPP), the Laboratorie d’Annecy–le–Vieux de Physique Th´eorique (LAPTH): the institutions which gave me the necessary resources to carry out my studies and my reseach work. In particular, the Universit`adi Torino with its Scholarship program, which allowed me to live under good conditions during all the PhD period in the beautiful city of Torino. On the other hand, the IDAPP gave me the great opportunity of doing the PhD also with a French institution (Universit´ede Savoie), an excellent opportunity to increase my experience and knowledge, to be in contact with a larger part of the world of Physics. Inside the IDAPP program I had the opportunity of visiting the LAPTH, where I met great people and I enjoyed a lot all the time I stayed there. Many people were close to me during this time, helping to make better the life here. Living far form your home, far from your Family, becomes easy if good friends are around you, and I had the possibility of finding great people. Roberto, Hamed, Alejandra, Antonio, Mari, Georgia, Diogo, John, Dar´ıo, Carolina, Alessandro, Fabio, Paola, Camilo, Alberto, Sabine, John, Daniel..., and the list continues. Colleagues and not. Inside and outside research and academic life. Friends. i ii The most important part of my life: My Family. My parents, Mario and Stella; my brothers, Mauricio and Diego, and my sisters Paola and Johana; my little loved nephews, Nicol´as and Samuel. They are my strongest impulse, my biggest love. Thanks to them, even being that far, I have been able to make my dreams real, I have been able to reach all my goals. Thanks to them I am finishing (also) this important phase of my life. Thanks to them I am giving another step in the long process I decided to follow long time ago. Thanks to them I am. Thanks to them, with my more sincere love. Together to my family there has always been God. Our total support. Thanks to God, who has given me the power I always need in my studies, in my work, in my life. Thanks to God. ABSTRACT Neutrino oscillations is a very well studied phenomenon and the observations from Solar, very–long–baseline Reactor, Atmospheric and Accelerator neutrino oscillation experiments give very robust evidence of three-neutrino mixing. On the other hand, some experimental data have shown anomalies that could be interpreted as indication of exotic neutrino physics beyond three-neutrino mixing. Fur- thermore, from a cosmological point of view, the possibility of extra light species con- tributing as a subdominant hot (or warm) component of the Universe is still interesting. In the first part of this Thesis, we focused on the anomaly observed in the Gallium radioactive source experiments. These experiments were done to test the Gallium solar neutrino detectors GALLEX and SAGE, by measuring the electron neutrino flux produced by intense artificial radioactive sources placed inside the detectors. The measured number of events was smaller than the expected one. We interpreted this anomaly as a possible indication of the disappearance of elec- tron neutrinos and, in the effective framework of two-neutrino mixing, we obtained sin2 2θ & 0.03 and ∆m2 & 0.1 eV2. We also studied the compatibility of this result with the data of the Bugey and Chooz reactor antineutrino disappearance experiments. We found that the Bugey data present a hint of neutrino oscillations with 0.02 . sin2 2θ . 0.07 and ∆m2 1.95 eV2, ≈ which is compatible with the Gallium allowed region of the mixing parameters. Then, combining the data of Bugey and Chooz, the data of Gallium and Bugey, and the data of Gallium, Bugey and Chooz, we found that this hint persists, with an acceptable compatibility of the experimental data. Furthermore, we analyzed the experimental data of the I.L.L., S.R.S, and G¨osgen nuclear Reactor experiments. We obtained a good fit of the I.L.L. data, showing 1 and 2σ allowed regions in the oscillation parameters space. However, the combination of I.L.L. data with the Bugey data showed a very low compatibility, so we did not use the I.L.L. data for additional analyses. iii Abstract Our fit of the S.R.S. experiment gave very small values of the goodness-of-fit, indicating that the data are incompatible with the oscillations hypothesis, as well as with the no oscillations hypothesis. We do not have any explanation for this result. From the analysis of the G¨osgen experiment, we obtained upper limits for the mixing parameters, excluding the region with sin2 2θ 0.3 and ∆m 0.05 eV2 at 3σ ≥ ≥ C.L.. With the combination of these data with those of Gallium, Bugey and Chooz, we found that the hint of neutrino oscillations persists with 0.03 . sin2 2θ . 0.07 and ∆m2 1.93 eV2, with a good compatibility of the data. However, the no oscillations ≈ hypothesis cannot be excluded. Motivated by these results, in the second part of this work we studied cosmological constrains on a light non–thermal sterile neutrino. We fitted up–to–date cosmological data with an extended ΛCDM model, including light relics with a mass in the range 0.1–10 eV. We obtained constrains on the current density and velocity dispersion of those relics, as well as constrains on their mass, as- suming that they consist either of early decoupled thermal relics, or of non-resonantly produced sterile neutrinos. Our results are useful to constrain particle–motivated mod- els with three active neutrinos and one extra light species. We got, for instance, that at the 3σ confidence level, a sterile neutrino with mass ms = 2 eV can be accommodated with the data provided that it is thermally dis- id id tributed with Ts/Tν . 0.8 (with Tν the temperature of neutrinos in the instantaneous decoupling limit), or is non-resonantly produced with ∆Neff . 0.5. The bounds be- come dramatically tighter when the mass increases. For ms . 0.9 eV and at the same confidence level, the data is still compatible with a standard thermalized neutrino. iv RESUMEN El fen´omeno de Oscilaci´on de neutrinos ha sido muy bien estudiado y las observaciones de los experimentos sobre oscilaciones de neutrinos Solares, de Reactores de longitud muy larga (very–long–baseline Reactor), Atmosf´ericos y de Aceleradores, dan evidencia muy robusta de mezcla de tres neutrinos.