23 September 2026

An inverse seesaw model for neutrino masses and mixing is proposed, based on the spontaneous breaking of a $D_4$ flavor symmetry. The model simultaneously accounts for the observed neutrino oscillation pattern, the baryon asymmetry of the Universe through TeV-scale leptogenesis, and potentially observable charged-lepton flavor violating (cLFV) processes. A phenomenological analysis shows that the model is consistent with current neutrino oscillation data for both normal and inverted mass orderings. Successful leptogenesis is realized for lightest pseudo-Dirac neutrino masses at the multi-TeV scale. The predicted cLFV branching ratios lie well below the current experimental upper limits while remaining within the sensitivity reach of next-generation experiments. These results establish the model as a viable and testable framework that links low-energy neutrino observables to TeV-scale leptogenesis and cLFV phenomenology.

We investigate thermal leptogenesis in an extension of the Type-I seesaw in which a real singlet scalar couples non-diagonally to the right-handed neutrinos. The interactions $-y_{ij}φN_iN_j$, with $i\neq j$, introduce new sources of CP violation in heavy-neutrino decays with a negligible enhancement of the standard leptonic washout. We derive an analytic upper bound on the scalar-induced CP asymmetry and present numerical results using fully flavoured Boltzmann equations and the density-matrix formalism. We show that the observed baryon asymmetry can be generated with a hierarchical right-handed-neutrino spectrum at the electroweak scale. In the minimal Type-I seesaw, lowering the scale of decay leptogenesis typically requires either a tuned quasi-degeneracy of the right-handed-neutrino masses or cancellations between the tree-level and one-loop contributions to the light-neutrino masses, while hierarchical leptogenesis instead requires a high scale that aggravates the Higgs hierarchy problem. This singlet-scalar extension appears to avoid these tensions, allowing successful leptogenesis with a hierarchical right-handed-neutrino spectrum down to the electroweak scale.

The possibility of describing neutrino masses through a single multiplet of modular forms in a modular symmetric framework is reanalysed. The minimal model achieving this is Feruglio's model based on modular $A_4$ symmetry, which contains a chiral flavon triplet $φ$, with all neutrino masses and mixing determined by a superfield triplet of modular forms $Y(τ)$. We point out that, in local supersymmetry, these superfields by themselves allow an additional $R$-parity-violating contribution to neutrino masses originating from the Kähler potential of the model. The $R$ violation manifests through a bilinear term $ε_i L_i H_u$ in the effective superpotential, with parameters $ε_i$ determined in terms of $Y(τ)$ and its derivatives. The Kähler potential also mixes neutrinos with the fermionic component of $φ$, leading to seesaw neutrino masses when these fermions are massive. Two separate cases are analysed, with neutrinos obtaining mass through the Weinberg operator or through the $φ$-induced seesaw. Unlike the original model, adding the $R$-violating contribution allows accurate reproduction of neutrino mixing angles and mass ratios for both the normal and inverted orderings in either case, with the Weinberg operator predicting a sum of neutrino masses close to the cosmological limit and the seesaw mechanism predicting ones comfortably below it.

Muons are powerful probes of fundamental physics at the precision and intensity frontiers. We review the status and planned upgrades of muon-beam facilities worldwide, together with the experimental apparatus required across three experimental categories. Charged-lepton flavor violation (CLFV) searches test charged-lepton flavor conservation through rare muon decays, muon-to-electron conversion in nuclei, and muonium--antimuonium conversion. Precision measurements of the muon magnetic and electric dipole moments, muonium spectroscopy, and muonic-atom spectroscopy test the Standard Model and bound-state QED and determine fundamental constants and nuclear charge and magnetization distributions. Muon-scattering programs include the MUonE determination of hadronic vacuum polarization, NA64$μ$ missing-momentum searches for invisible dark sectors, and the phased PKMu program, which investigates muonphilic dark matter, light mediators, LFV muon--electron processes, and atomic effects in resonant annihilation. We emphasize the beam intensity, timing, purity, and phase-space control, as well as beamline and detector design, background suppression, and experimental techniques needed to achieve next-generation sensitivity and precision.

Asymmetric orbifolds provide concrete examples of non-geometric constructions dubbed T-folds. All Z2 point groups of six dimensional asymmetric order-two orbifolds are identified. The order-two T-fold configurations on the SO(12) lattice are classified at the fermionic point of type II string theories for all Z2 point groups. The spectra of the models on these configurations are presented parametrically, in terms of certain generalised GSO phases. The minimal effective Hodge numbers were found to be (h_{11},h_{12})=(1,1) for six T-fold configurations. Asymmetric generalisations of the mirror symmetry map are conjectured. The orientifoldable configurations using the basic worldsheet parity were identified within the classification. Twisted sectors corresponding to pure asymmetric twists may contain Rarita-Schwinger multiplets with spin-3/2 states. Throughout the paper, generalised GSO projections are chosen to preserve the maximal amount of supersymmetry possible. Relaxing this, the order-two point groups were identified for which non--supersymmetric T-folds can be constructed. Since some of them may enhance to N=1 or, even, N=2 supergravities, we argue that appearance of spin-3/2 states necessarily implies that the spectrum has reorder itself in a supersymmetric fashion and hence that the vacuum energy vanishes.

We investigate how neutrino--dark matter (DM) interactions modify the flavor composition of high-energy neutrinos from active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Coherent forward scattering in a DM spike around the central supermassive black hole can generate a flavor-dependent potential, inducing flavor conversion as the neutrinos escape. We calculate the flavor composition at Earth for pion-decay and muon-damped sources and find substantial departures from vacuum-oscillation expectations. At neutrino energies around $100\,\mathrm{TeV}$, the matter potential begins to compete with vacuum oscillations when the coupling-weighted net DM number density reaches $|ε_α(n_χ-n_{\barχ})|\sim10^{18}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3}$. We compare our predictions with IceCube flavor triangle measurements under the illustrative assumption that the diffuse flux originates from AGNs with common neutrino-production and DM-spike properties. Under this assumption, when the DM-induced potential acts on the muon flavor and dominates the vacuum terms at production, the $pγ$ muon-damped predictions lie outside the 95\% MESE contour. High-energy neutrino flavor measurements can therefore provide a novel probe of neutrino-DM interactions in astrophysical environments.

Cosmogenic $^{9}$Li and $^{8}$He isotopes constitute an important correlated background in low-energy neutrino experiments because their $β$-delayed neutron decay signatures can mimic inverse beta decay signals. Conventional estimates based on the time since the last muon become challenging at high muon rates, while muon-related vetoes further reduce the residual isotope statistics. We extend the conventional time fit to an event-level muon-categorized joint time (J-MuCAT) fit, which uses the time to the most recent preceding muon in each energy-loss category. A complementary estimate is obtained from the candidate-to-muon-track distance distribution (TraDiTS). The muon-uncorrelated component is determined from the far-distance region and subtracted. This estimate is then used to constrain the J-MuCAT fit, defining the distance-constrained J-MuCAT (DCJ-MuCAT) fit. In detector-level simulation with successive cosmogenic-background vetoes, DCJ-MuCAT reduces the statistical uncertainty by more than $40\%$ relative to J-MuCAT and by more than $10\%$ relative to the TraDiTS. The fitted results remain consistent with the simulation truth. Applicability studies further show good performance over a broad range of muon rates and isotope fractions. The proposed framework provides a practical approach for estimating residual $^{9}$Li/$^{8}$He backgrounds in large neutrino detectors.

We present a deep-learning surrogate for the Earth matter effect on solar neutrinos. The model uses a residual convolutional network conditioned on the solar neutrino oscillation parameters and is trained on numerical solutions computed over a grid of parameter values. It predicts the Earth-induced transition probabilities across neutrino energy and zenith angle, providing a fast approximation to the direct numerical calculation. For the reference electron-neutrino survival probability, the surrogate achieves a pointwise relative accuracy of approximately $2\%$ and a speed-up of about a factor of 60 in a laptop-CPU test. Since the network learns only the Earth-crossing propagation, it can be applied without retraining to new-physics scenarios that leave this propagation unchanged. The surrogate can also be retrained using alternative numerical implementations or extended parameter sets, providing a flexible and computationally efficient approach for solar-neutrino analyses. The code and simulation data are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-Driven-HEP/NuMatterSurrogate.

When multiple differential cross-section measurements are extracted from a common event sample, the same events contribute simultaneously to multiple distributions. This event-sharing structure imposes exact linear constraints among the bin counts, reducing the effective dimensionality of the measurement below the total number of bins. Since the covariance matrix obeys these inter-distribution constraints, it contains a rank deficiency. While limited numerical precision may inadvertently restore invertibility, the $χ^{2}$ contributions along constrained dimensions will be arbitrary, yielding unphysically inflated $χ^{2}$ values in global goodness-of-fit tests. We present the range-projected $χ^{2}$, a test statistic that restricts the goodness-of-fit test to the subspace carrying independent statistical information, yielding a $χ^{2}$ with $N_\text{bins} - N_\text{null}$ degrees of freedom, where $N_\text{null}$ is the number of independent constraints. We show that this rank deficiency is a predictable consequence of the event-sharing structure, and that $N_\text{null}$ decomposes into a structural contribution determined a priori from the binning geometry and a kinematic contribution that depends on the phase-space occupancy. The method is validated with an analytical toy model and a simulated neutrino--argon cross-section measurement including unfolding and multi-source systematic uncertainties.

Neutrino astronomy at high energies is an emerging field but still in a state of infancy. It is barely a dozen years ago that a diffuse flux of extraterrestrial neutrinos with energies in the TeV and PeV ranges was detected and even fewer that first individual sources could be identified. A new window to the universe has been opened after four decades of efforts to realize the gigantic instruments that made that breakthrough possible. This review describes the road towards the present, reviews the actual status of the field and sketches future developments.

A confining dark sector modeled after quantum chromodynamics provides a well-motivated framework for strongly-interacting dark matter. We show that dark vector mesons in a confining dark sector can be resonantly produced in high-energy neutrino scattering on the cosmic neutrino background, generating a distinctive absorption feature in the cosmic neutrino energy spectrum. Unlike conventional attenuation effects, this feature directly reflects the mass spectrum of dark resonances and can therefore serve as a spectroscopic signature of a strongly-interacting dark sector. We find that a broad range of dark-sector parameter space is within the reach of future neutrino telescopes, including IceCube-Gen2 Radio. Our proposal thus turns the cosmic neutrino background into a target for discovering dark-sector resonances, while simultaneously providing a novel probe of dark sector interactions with neutrinos.