Speaker
Description
Neutrinos oscillate with large mixing angles. Dirac neutrino masses are small
compared to the other Standard Model fermions and a near-degenerate mass spectrum
is compatible with experimental data on neutrino masses. However, large mixing is not
radiatively stable in the near-degenerate case. Here, we find that the Standard Model lies
close to a transition between a phase with large and a phase with vanishing mixing angles.
This gives rise to a bound on neutrino masses: given the measured mass differences, the
electron neutrino mass cannot be larger than approximately 1 eV within the Standard Model.
Beyond the Standard Model, in the presence of asymptotically safe quantum gravity, the
bound is lowered to ∼ 0.6 − 0.7 eV, pushing the transition tantalizingly close to the current
experimental bound by the KATRIN experiment.
| Affiliation | Heidelberg University |
|---|---|
| Career status | PhD student |