Particle physics implications of the WMAP neutrino mass bound

Abstract

The recently published cosmological bound on the absolute neutrino masses obtained from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data has important consequences for neutrino experiments and models. Taken at face value, the new bound excludes the determination of the absolute neutrino mass in the KATRIN experiment and disfavors a neutrino oscillation interpretation of the LSND experiment. Combined with the KamLAND and Super-K data, the WMAP bound defines an accessible range for the neutrinoless double beta decay amplitude. The bound also impacts the Z-burst annihilation mechanism for resonant generation of extreme-energy cosmic rays on the cosmic neutrino background in two ways: it constrains the local overdensity of neutrino dark matter which is not helpful, but it also limits the resonant energy to a favorable range. In R-parity violating SUSY models neutrino masses are generated by trilinear and bilinear lepton number violating couplings. The WMAP result improves the constraints on these couplings over their existing values by an order of magnitude.