Conveners
Friday Afternoon: Friday Afternoon 1
- Kevin Kelly (Texas A&M University)
Friday Afternoon: Friday Afternoon 2
- Nikita Blinov (York University)
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Julia Gehrlein (Colorado State University (US))29/05/2026, 14:30
The flavor puzzle remains one of the biggest open questions in particle theory and upcoming results from neutrino experiments will provide a large impact on its solution. While it is difficult to constrain many classes of leptonic flavor models at the moment, this will change in coming years as several yet unknown quantities will be measured with some precision. Combined with expected...
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Asher Berlin (Fermilab)29/05/2026, 14:55
Neutrinos oscillate into antineutrinos in a background of ultralight vector dark matter coupled to lepton number, such as the gauge boson of B-L. This effect is suppressed by the small neutrino mass, but the enhancement by long astrophysical baselines can enable uncharted parameter space to be explored by future searches for solar and supernova antineutrinos. For instance, the observation of a...
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Gustavo Alves29/05/2026, 15:20
We examine decoherence in neutrino oscillations induced by an ultralight scalar field coupled to neutrinos. The scalar induces time- and position-dependent shifts in the neutrino mass matrix. Neutrinos sample different field configurations throughout an experimental data-taking period, which leads to damping effects in the oscillation pattern in the form of decoherence. By recasting the...
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Adrienne Erickcek29/05/2026, 15:45
If dark matter is not completely cold, the random motions of dark matter particles erase density fluctuations on scales smaller than their free-streaming length. This suppression contributes to the cosmological upper bound on the sum of the neutrino masses, which is uncomfortably close to the minimal value allowed by measurements of neutrino oscillations. It would seem that reducing the...
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Dr Toni Makela (University of California, Irvine)29/05/2026, 16:50
In recent years, the ATOMKI collaboration has performed a series of measurements of excited nuclei, observing a resonant excess of electron-positron pairs at large opening angles compared to the Standard Model prediction. The excess has been hypothesized to be due to the production of a new spin-1 or spin-0 particle, X17, with a mass of about 17 MeV, implying a possible fifth force. Recently,...
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Zackaria Chacko (University of Maryland, College Park)29/05/2026, 17:15
I discuss fifth forces mediated by an ultralight scalar that arises as a composite pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson from a strongly coupled hidden sector. In this framework, the scalar couples to the Standard Model through the hypercharge portal, and its interactions are softened above the compositeness scale by form factors. This can significantly weaken the bounds from equivalence principle (EP)...
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Can Kilic29/05/2026, 17:40
Portal models, where new physics lives in a hidden sector neutral under the SM gauge groups provide a relatively weakly constrained way to extend the SM at the GeV-to-TeV scale. In this talk I will focus on some novel experimental signatures of the neutrino portal to a non-minimal hidden sector, as well as the phenomenology of a Z-prime model coupled to a non-anomalous and flavor-universal...
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Scott Watson
I will discuss recent work on the production of both axions and WIMPs in UV-complete theories of the early universe. This approach is naturally motivated by the challenge of embedding inflation and its aftermath, up to BBN, in a fundamental theory.
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