The observation of neutrino flavor oscillations marks the dawn of a new era in neutrino physics: the era of massive neutrinos.
I am going to describe two possible ways that allow to give a measure of neutrino mass: Supernova (SN) neutrinos and neutrino-less double beta decay (0nbb) searches.
Core-collapse SN emits huge amount of MeV, all-flavors neutrinos, that propagate through the Universe until reaching the Earth. It is possible to extract bounds on the neutrino mass by observing the time delay that SN neutrinos acquire during propagation due to their non-zero mass. The ability of next-generation neutrino observatories to look at the very early stage of the SN neutrino emission, the so called neutronization burst, reveals to be of crucial importance in order to perform model-independent mass measurements.
On the other hand, 0nbb searches allow to constrain the so called effective Majorana neutrino mass by measuring the expected decay rate of the candidate isotope. The huge uncertainties coming from nuclear physics, from both the theory and simulations sides, affect dramatically current and future sensitivities on Majorana mass, although prospects from future setups reach promising results.
Thematic Area: Theoretical Physics