We consider the impact of neutral-current (NC) non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) on the determination of the neutrino mass ordering. We show that in presence of NSI there is an exact degeneracy which makes it impossible to determine the neutrino mass ordering and the octant of the solar mixing angle θ12 at oscillation experiments. The degeneracy holds at the probability level and for arb...

Early black hole formation in a core-collapse supernova will abruptly truncate the neutrino fluxes. The sharp cutoff can be used to make model-independent time-of-flight neutrino mass tests. Assuming a neutrino luminosity of 10(52) erg/s per flavor at cutoff and a distance of 10 kpc, Super-Kamiokande can detect an electron neutrino mass as small as 1.8 eV, and the proposed OMNIS detector can de...

It has been shown recently that the exchange of virtual νν̄ pairs leads to an unphysically large energy-density in neutron stars and white dwarfs, unless neutrinos have a minimum mass,mν > ∼ 0.4 eV/c 2 . Here we consider the possibility that the presence of trapped low-energy neutrinos can suppress the exchange of virtual νν̄ pairs, thereby avoiding a large energy-density even for massless neutri...

In this lecture we shall discuss two central problems of particle physics and cosmology. The neutrino mass is one of the key quantities in grand unified theories, and at the same time candidate for hot dark matter in the Universe. Supersymmetry is regarded as the most natural extension of present particle physics theories. The lighest SUSY particle, usually assumed to be the neutralino, is the ...

In some classes of flavour models based on unified theories with a type I see-saw mechanism, the prediction for the mass of the lightest right-handed neutrino is in conflict with the lower bound from the requirement of successful thermal leptogenesis. We investigate how lifting the absolute neutrino mass scale by adding a type II see-saw contribution proportional to the unit matrix can solve th...