Tuesdays 10:30 - 11:30 | Fridays 11:30 - 12:30
Showing votes from 2015-10-02 12:30 to 2015-10-06 11:30 | Next meeting is Tuesday Jul 7th, 10:30 am.
We use a complete and rigorous statistical indicator to measure the level of concordance between cosmological data sets, without relying on the inspection of the marginal posterior distribution of some selected parameters. We apply this test to state of the art cosmological data sets, to assess their agreement within the $\Lambda$CDM model. We find that there is a good level of concordance between all the experiments with one noticeable exception. There is substantial evidence of tension between the CMB, temperature and polarization, measurements of the Planck satellite and the data from the CFHTLenS weak lensing survey even when applying ultra conservative cuts. These results robustly point toward the possibility of having unaccounted systematic effects in the data, an incomplete modelling of the cosmological predictions or hints toward new physical phenomena.
In the framework of quantum field theory, a graviton interacts locally with a quantum state having definite mass, i.e. the gravitational mass eigenstate, while a weak boson interacts with a state having definite flavor, i.e. the flavor eigenstate. An interaction of a neutrino with an energetic graviton may trigger the collapse of the neutrino to a definite mass eigenstate with probability expressed in terms of PMNS mixing matrix elements. Thus, gravitons would induce quantum decoherence of a coherent neutrino flavor state similarly to how weak bosons induce quantum decoherence of a neutrino in a definite mass state. We demonstrate that such an essentially quantum gravity effect may have strong consequences for neutrino oscillation phenomena in astrophysics due to relatively large scattering cross sections of relativistic neutrinos undergoing large-angle radiation of energetic gravitons in gravitational field of a classical massive source (i.e. the quasi-classical case of gravitational Bethe-Heitler scattering). This graviton-induced {\it decoherence} is compared to {\it decoherence} due to propagation in the presence of the Earth matter effect. Based on this study, we propose a new technique for the indirect detection of energetic gravitons by measuring the flavor composition of astrophysical neutrinos.