This thesis focuses on exploring the explanatory and discovery potential of the four-neutrino and enhanced neutrino magnetic and electric dipole moments hypotheses when applied to the NOvA/T2K discrepancy and the XENON1T anomaly, respectively. Firstly, we study the effect of a very light (sub eV) sterile neutrino on the NOvA/T2K anom- aly. We find that for some regions of the parameter space the four-neutrino hypothe- sis is preferred with moderate significance. Secondly, we study the parameter space of the neutrino dipole moment matrix given Majorana or Dirac neutrinos. We discuss the XENON1T anomaly given the recent XENOXnT measurement. We also study how the potential physics reach of future experiments depends on the nature of neutrinos. We find that a next-generation experiment two orders of magnitude more sensitive to the neutrino dipole moments via muon-neutrino elastic scattering could discover that neutrino electro- magnetic moments are nonzero if neutrinos are Dirac fermions. Instead, if neutrinos are Majorana fermions, such a discovery is excluded by existing solar neutrino data, unless there are more than three light neutrinos.

Creator

• Jusino Sánchez, Giancarlo

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-bzr1-1256

Subject

• Physics
• Particle physics

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_985471
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16558

Keyword

• Particles
• Neutrinos
• Physics
• Phenomenology
• Neutrino Magnetic Moment
• Sterile Neutrino

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright