Present Aspects and Future Prospects of Neutrino Mass and Oscillation

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current understanding of neutrino mass and oscillation, emphasizing the importance of experimental measurements and the structure of the neutrino mass matrix for uncovering physics beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It analyzes the potential of existing and future neutrino experiments to determine unknown parameters and explores the effects of texture zeros in neutrino mass matrices with sterile neutrinos.

Findings

Synergy between experiments can improve parameter determination.

Texture zeros influence neutrino mass matrix phenomenology.

Current experiments constrain neutrino mixing parameters.

Abstract

Neutrinos are neutral, spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles which undergo only weak interactions. The experimentally observed phenomenon of neutrino oscillation establishes the fact that neutrinos are massive and there is mixing between different neutrino flavours. This constitutes the first unambiguous hint towards the physics Beyond Standard Model (BSM). In the BSM theories, the neutrino mass terms in the Lagrangian lead to the non-diagonal neutrino mass matrix in the flavour basis which depends on neutrino mass and mixing parameters. Thus knowledge of the neutrino oscillation parameters and understanding the underlying symmetries of the neutrino mass matrix are very important as they can give an insight to the new physics beyond Standard Model. Therefore the measurement of different oscillation parameters and studying the structure of the neutrino mass matrix are some of the main goals in neutrino physics at present. In this thesis we have studied the potential of present/future neutrino oscillation experiments and synergy between them to determine the unknown parameters in the neutrino sector in the light of current experimental results. We have also studied the phenomenological consequences of texture zeros in the neutrino mass matrices in the presence of a sterile neutrino.