Gaia writing, neutrino masses

In a remarkable turn of events, I finished writing a paper today! More specifically, I finished what I would call the “zeroth draft” of my paper (or really just short note) on the Gaia likelihood function. I checked in with Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA) and he encouraged me to take it through some revisions and submit it to arXiv. We shall see if I make it.

At lunch-time, the NYU CCPP Brown Bag talk was by Derek Inman (NYU) on neutrino masses. He explained what's known from oscillation experiments, from beta-decay experiments, and from cosmology. The laboratory bounds put lower limits on the neutrino masses, and the cosmological bounds put upper limits. The cosmological bounds are very strong, but they are also very dependent on having a very good cosmogonic model. That is, they are not even close to being model-independent. He did a nice job explaining how the flavor eigentstates relate to the propagation eigenstates, and the mass hierarchies. It is a nice set of problems.