Future neutrino experiments may provide tomographic scans of Earth’s interior by viewing solar neutrinos that pass through our planet’s layers.  

Synopsis on:
A. N. Ioannisian, A. Yu. Smirnov, and D. Wyler
Phys. Rev. D 96, 036005 (2017)

A dramatic scenario in which a compact black hole eats a spinning neutron star from inside might explain a nearby galaxy’s unexpectedly high abundance of heavy elements.

Viewpoint on:
George M. Fuller, Alexander Kusenko, and Volodymyr Takhistov
Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 061101 (2017)

T2K measured the neutrino mass difference $\delta m_{32}^2$ and the mixing angle ${\theta }_{23}$ both for neutrinos and, separately, for anti-neutrinos. Their results for the mass difference and mixing angle are not only highly competitive, but, since they show no difference in these two modes, provide important evidence that CPT is not violated within the accuracy of their measurements.

A spinning black hole may lose up to 9% of its mass by spontaneously growing “hair” in the form of excitations of a hypothetical particle field with a tiny mass.

Viewpoint on:
William E. East and Frans Pretorius
Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 041101 (2017)

Using data on the Lyman-α spectra obtained by the X-shooter and HIRES/MIKE spectrographs, bounds on warm dark matter are computed using state-of-the-art analysis. This places a new best lower limit of 5.3 keV on the mass of thermal relic dark matter.

By performing clever manipulations of complicated equations of motion, the authors obtain new instanton solutions of eleven-dimensional supergravity. These results support a previously proposed conjecture that all non-supersymmetric anti-de-Sitter (AdS) vacua must be unstable.

The authors reexamine the form of the expression used to extract the nucleon EDM from lattice QCD calculations and discover a subtle additional subtraction due to mixing between form factors. They check their claim by comparing with a different method to compute the EDM. Applying their correction to previous computations they obtain more consistent results, albeit now all consistent with a vanishing EDM within errors.