On the Life of Self-Quenching Counters

Gas counter for low temperature Conversion Electron Mössbauer Spectroscopy experiments

“…Therefore, to insure a stable operation, monatomic gases are usually mixed with few percents of polyatomic gases such as CH 4 , N 2 , CO 2 and Iso-C 4 H 10 called quenching gases [6]. The addition of polyatomic gases can reduce the counter lifetime because of the decomposition of the polyatomic molecules leading to a modification of the gas composition [9]. However, this problem can be overcome by using gas flow counters.…”

Some attempts to explain the MINOS anomaly

“…Firstly, the best fit point lies in the region which is excluded by the atmospheric neutrino data [12]. Secondly, while the disfavored region at 3σ CL almost coincides with the one by the atmospheric neutrino data [12], the significance of the standard case (ε ee = ε eτ = 0) compared with the best fit point is only 0.07σ CL. Therefore, we conclude that it is not worth introducing this scenario to explain the MINOS anomaly.…”

“…The disfavored region [11] obtained from the MINOS data [1]. The region above the diagonal straight lines is excluded because of the atmospheric neutrino data [12]. The contours are drawn to exaggerate its significance.…”

Loop bounds on non-standard neutrino interactions

“…Neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) were originally proposed [1] as a mechanism to produce neutrino flavour conversion in matter and considered as a possible explanation for the solar and atmospheric neutrino deficits [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Although it is now clear that such NSI cannot fully account for the observed neutrino flavour conversion, the increasing sensitivity of neutrino oscillation experiments to sub-leading effects has triggered a new interest in them and their interference with neutrino oscillations at present (e.g., K2K, MINOS, OPERA [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]) and future (e.g., SuperBeams, βBeams or Neutrino Factories [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30]) facilities. In particular, the determination of the leptonic mixing angle θ 13 could be severely affected by degeneracies with the non-standard parameters [31,32,33].…”

“…Consequently, the non-standard coupling strength ε f f eµ was neglected in a large number of studies (see for example Refs. [12,13,14,15,16,29,40,41,42,43,44]). However, as we will show, when gauge invariance is imposed, only naturalness arguments can be invoked.…”