We employ state-of-the art cosmological observables including supernova surveys and BAO information to provide constraints on the mass and mixing angle of a non-resonantly produced sterile neutrino species, showing that cosmology can effectively rule out sterile neutrinos which decay between BBN and the present day. The decoupling of an additional heavy neutrino species can modify the time dependence of the Universe's expansion between BBN and recombination and, in extreme cases, lead to an additional matter-dominated period; while this could naively lead to a younger Universe with a larger Hubble parameter, it could later be compensated by the extra radiation expected in the form of neutrinos from sterile decay. However, recombination-era observables including the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the shift parameter RCMB and the sound horizon rs from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) severely constrain this scenario. We self-consistently include the full time-evolution of the coupled sterile neutrino and standard model sectors in an MCMC, showing that if decay occurs after BBN, the sterile neutrino is essentially bounded by the constraint sin 2 θ 0.026(ms/eV) −2 .

BrainX3 is a large-scale simulation of human brain activity with real-time interaction, rendered in 3D in a virtual reality environment, which combines computational power with human intuition for the exploration and analysis of complex dynamical networks. We ground this simulation on structural connectivity obtained from diffusion spectrum imaging data and model it on neuronal population dynamics. Users can interact with BrainX3 in real-time by perturbing brain regions with transient stimulations to observe reverberating network activity, simulate lesion dynamics or implement network analysis functions from a library of graph theoretic measures. BrainX3 can thus be used as a novel immersive platform for exploration and analysis of dynamical activity patterns in brain networks, both at rest or in a task-related state, for discovery of signaling pathways associated to brain function and/or dysfunction and as a tool for virtual neurosurgery. Our results demonstrate these functionalities and shed insight on the dynamics of the resting-state attractor. Specifically, we found that a noisy network seems to favor a low firing attractor state. We also found that the dynamics of a noisy network is less resilient to lesions. Our simulations on TMS perturbations show that even though TMS inhibits most of the network, it also sparsely excites a few regions. This is presumably due to anti-correlations in the dynamics and suggests that even a lesioned network can show sparsely distributed increased activity compared to healthy resting-state, over specific brain areas.

The low energy neutrino factory has been proposed as a very sensitive setup for future searches for CP violation and matter effects. Here we study how its performance is affected when the experimental specifications of the setup are varied. Most notably, we have considered the addition of the 'platinum' νµ → νe channel. We find that, whilst theoretically the extra channel provides very useful complementary information and helps to lift degeneracies, its practical usefulness is lost when considering realistic background levels. Conversely, an increase in statistics in the 'golden' νe → νµ channel and, to some extent, an improvement in the energy resolution, lead to an important increase in the performance of the facility, given the rich energy dependence of the 'golden' channel at these energies. We show that a low energy neutrino factory with a baseline of 1300 km, muon energy of 4.5 GeV, and either a 20 kton totally active scintillating detector or 100 kton liquid argon detector, can have outstanding sensitivity to the neutrino oscillation parameters θ13, δ and the mass hierarchy. For our estimated exposure of 2.8 × 10 23 kton × decays per muon polarity, the low energy neutrino factory has sensitivity to θ13 and δ for sin 2 (2θ13) > 10 −4 and to the mass hierarchy for sin 2 (2θ13) > 10 −3 .

Geometrical tests such as the combination of the Hubble parameter H(z) and the angular diameter distance d A (z) can, in principle, break the degeneracy between the dark energy equation of state parameter w(z), and the spatial curvature Ω k in a direct, model-independent way. In practice, constraints on these quantities achievable from realistic experiments, such as those to be provided by Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) galaxy surveys in combination with CMB data, can resolve the cosmic confusion between the dark energy equation of state parameter and curvature only statistically and within a parameterized model for w(z). Combining measurements of both H(z) and d A (z) up to sufficiently high redshifts z ∼ 2 and employing a parameterization of the redshift evolution of the dark energy equation of state are the keys to resolve the w(z) − Ω k degeneracy.

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In this study, a human hip joint with Cam-type Femoroacetabular Impingement (FAI) is studied by the Finite Element Method (FEM). This pathology consists of a malformation that causes a lack of sphericity of the head of the femur. In turn, this causes wear and tear of the cartilage, a cause of early osteoarthritis of the hip. The objective is to use the FEM to analyze and compare the increase in the von Mises stress and displacement of the cartilage in healthy and damaged (with Cam-type) human hip joints that this syndrome affects. The 3D models were reconstructed from two medical CT scans of a healthy and a damaged hip joint that were obtained, five years apart, for a male of 80 kg in weight. The 3D models were reconstructed using 3D Slicer software. The cortical and trabecular bone, as well as the cartilage, were segmented. The defects were corrected by MesMixer software that generated STL files. Both models were imported into the Marc Mentat® software for the Finite Element Analysis (FEA). It was noted that the thickness of the cartilage decreased enormously during the five years, which suggests imminent mechanical contact between the head of the femur and the acetabulum of the pelvis. The FEA results showed an excessive increase in the stress and displacement of the cartilage. This will certainly result in a condition of osteoarthritis for the patient in the future years.

Neutrinos are one of the most promising messengers for signals of new physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM). On the theoretical side, their elusive nature, combined with their unknown mass mechanism, seems to indicate that the neutrino sector is indeed opening a window to new physics. On the experimental side, several long-standing anomalies have been reported in the past decades, providing a strong motivation to thoroughly test the standard three-neutrino oscillation paradigm. In this Snowmass21 white paper, we explore the potential of current and future neutrino experiments to explore BSM effects on neutrino flavor during the next decade.