Evolution of Primordial Neutrino Helicities in Astrophysical Magnetic Fields and Implications for Their Detection.

Since decoupling in the early Universe in helicity states, primordial neutrinos propagating in astrophysical magnetic fields precess and undergo helicity changes. In view of various experimental bounds allowing a large magnetic moment of neutrinos, we estimate the helicity flipping for relic neutrinos in both cosmic and galactic magnetic fields. The flipping probability is sensitive both to the neutrino magnetic moment and the structure of the magnetic fields and is a potential probe of the fields. As we find, even a magnetic moment well below that suggested by XENON1T could significantly affect relic neutrino helicities and their detection rate via inverse tritium beta decay.

Physics with reactor neutrinos.

Neutrinos produced by nuclear reactors have played a major role in advancing our knowledge of the properties of neutrinos. The first direct detection of the neutrino, confirming its existence, was performed using reactor neutrinos. More recent experiments utilizing reactor neutrinos have also found clear evidence for neutrino oscillation, providing unique input for the determination of neutrino mass and mixing. Ongoing and future reactor neutrino experiments will explore other important issues, including the neutrino mass hierarchy and the search for sterile neutrinos and other new physics beyond the standard model. In this article, we review the recent progress in physics using reactor neutrinos and the opportunities they offer for future discoveries.

Connected-sea partons.

According to the path-integral formalism of the hadronic tensor, the nucleon sea contains two distinct components called the connected sea (CS) and the disconnected sea (DS). We discuss how the CS and DS are accessed in the lattice QCD calculation of the moments of the parton distributions. We show that the CS and DS components of u(x) + d(x) can be extracted by using recent data on the strangeness parton distribution, the CT10 global fit, and the lattice result of the ratio of the strange to u(d) moments in the disconnected insertion. The extracted CS and DS for u(x) + d(x) have a distinct Bjorken x dependence in qualitative agreement with expectation. The analysis also shows that the momentum fraction of u(x) + d(x) is about equally divided between the CS and DS at Q(2) = 2.5 GeV(2). Implications for the future global analysis of parton distributions are presented.

Flavor asymmetry of the nucleon sea and the five-quark components of the nucleons.

The existence of the five-quark Fock states for the intrinsic charm quark in the nucleons was suggested some time ago, but conclusive evidence is still lacking. We generalize the previous theoretical approach to the light-quark sector and study possible experimental signatures for such five-quark states. In particular, we compare the d-u and u + d-s-s data with the calculations based on the five-quark Fock states. The qualitative agreement between the data and the calculations is interpreted as evidence for the existence of the intrinsic light-quark sea in the nucleons. The probabilities for the |uuduu and |uuddd Fock states are also extracted.