Indian Researchers Unravel Neutrino Mysteries, Redefining Universe’s Energy Blueprint

In the realm of neutrino physics, a pair of researchers, Prokash Pegu and Chandan Duarah from Tezpur University in India, are making strides in understanding a phenomenon that could have significant implications for our understanding of the universe. Their recent work focuses on the effective Majorana neutrino mass, a key factor in the search for neutrinoless double beta decay, a process that, if observed, would confirm that neutrinos are their own antiparticles.

The researchers’ study builds upon their previous work, which considered an exact μ-τ reflection symmetry in the light effective Majorana neutrino mass matrix and the corresponding lepton mixing matrix at the seesaw scale. This symmetry implies that the mixing angles and phases of the muon and tau leptons are related in a specific way. In their earlier research, Pegu and Duarah chose numerical values for all mixing parameters and neutrino mass eigenvalues at the seesaw scale and estimated the values of these parameters at the electroweak scale due to radiative corrections. They found that these low-energy predictions were consistent with global neutrino oscillation data.

In their latest work, published in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers have taken these low-energy values and used them to compute the effective Majorana neutrino mass, denoted as |ee|. This mass is a crucial factor in the rate of neutrinoless double beta decay, a rare process that, if detected, would provide evidence for the Majorana nature of neutrinos. The researchers found that their predictions for |ee| are consistent with the latest upper bound provided by the KamLAND-Zen Collaboration, a multinational experiment searching for neutrinoless double beta decay.

The practical applications of this research for the energy sector are not immediate, as the study is primarily focused on fundamental particle physics. However, understanding the nature of neutrinos and their masses could have implications for our understanding of the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry, which in turn could impact our understanding of the early universe and the conditions that led to the formation of stars and galaxies. This knowledge could potentially influence our understanding of the universe’s energy budget and the processes that drive the evolution of stars and other astronomical objects. Moreover, the techniques and methodologies developed in this research could be applied to other areas of particle physics and beyond, potentially leading to new technologies and applications in the energy sector.

This article is based on research available at arXiv.