Are Neutrinos Really Massive? (And Top Quark Mass Technicalities)

Neutrino oscillation is the primary evidence for the conclusion that neutrinos have mass. And, this paradigm has been pretty successful so far (although, with six degrees of freedom, fitting the data isn't necessary too difficult). The short (five page) paper below makes the provocative argument that neutrino oscillation arises from the curvature of space-time rather than from massive neutrinos.

This would solve the problem of how neutrinos acquire mass, which is a major unsolved problem in physics, in an unexpected way: they don't. I'm skeptical, and this isn't a fully worked out idea that explains neutrino oscillation in full yet. But it is at least notable and deserves serious exploration by other researchers to see if this idea really has merit.

The Dirac equation in stationary curved spacetime implies that describing two-flavor neutrino oscillations requires treating the invariant mass and conserved energy of each propagating state distinctly, as gravity affects energy differently than mass. 

By re-analysing the publicly released KamLAND dataset, we show that modeling flavor states of massless neutrinos as two-level quantum states with energy-dependent level splitting, analogous to modified Jaynes-Cummings models, results in a higher-likelihood fit to the observed data than the standard massive-neutrino paradigm.

Golam Mortuza Hossain, Pushpit Kumar, "Neutrino Oscillations without Mass: A Re-analysis of KamLAND Data following the Dirac Equation in Curved Spacetime" arXiv:2609.39638 (September 30, 2026).

In other physics news, a preprint suggests corrections to the formula used to determine the top quark mass in one of the approaches used to do so (the introduction to the paper is also a good background discussion of the general issue addressed):

We calculate the three-loop O(αα2s) mixed QCD-EW corrections to the top quark mass and obtain the relationships between the pole (Mt) and MS bar (mt(μ)) masses at this order. 

In performing our calculation, we express the three-loop self-energies as a function of three-loop master integrals (MIs). These MIs are defined so as to solve a differential equation in ϵ-factorized form, allowing for their solution to be expressed as iterated integrals. We discuss the types of differential forms that we encounter, which include periods of elliptic curves, and their role in the final physical result. 

Using our results, we calculate the shift in mt(Mt) arising at this order. For Mt = 172.3 GeV, the shift is -216 MeV, which is comparable to the currently quoted experimental uncertainty.

Daniele Gaggero, Ciaran Williams, "O(αα2s) corrections to the Top Quark mass" arXiv:2609.40229 (September 30, 2026).

The Treaty of Kadesh

 

The Treaty of Kadesh signed around 1269 BCE is the oldest known peace treaty, and a new fragment of it found recently relates to the treatment of refugees.

The manga Red River portrays the Battle of Kadesh which occurred several years earlier and gave rise to it, and also alludes to some of its provisions (such as treating prisoners of war decently).

Do Galaxy Rotation Curves Decline Or Are They Indefinitely Flat?

Other studies have strongly suggested that galaxy rotation curves remain flat indefinitely for as far as they can be observed. This study claims that they decline in a Keplerian manner at the extremes of their outer portions.

Jeans-based measurements of the Milky Way (MW) rotation curve (RC) have revealed a declining outer RC. The interpretation, however, depends sensitively on the tracer selection, the tracer density profile, gradient terms in the Jeans equation, and non-axisymmetric perturbations in the outer disk. 

We present a more self-consistent Jeans analysis of the MW RC and reassess whether the outer decline remains after a revised treatment of the main Jeans terms and their associated systematic uncertainties, including those related to non-axisymmetric perturbations. We select a kinematically homogeneous disk tracer sample designed to retain stars on nearly circular disk orbits, removing only 12% of the original sample. We estimate the tracer density profile from the same stars used for the kinematic moments, rather than adopting an external scale length. 

We find that the tracer density profile is better described by a double exponential over the validated range 12.5 < R < 21 kpc. We also assess the main systematic uncertainties associated with the fiducial Jeans equation terms, including the often neglected cross term, and account for different rotational velocities in the outer disk substructures. The derived RC remains nearly flat in the inner disk and declines at large radii. Over the adopted outer interval, R≳16kpc, the RC slope is consistent with a Keplerian decline even after accounting for the systematic uncertainties. The corresponding mass modeling gives an extrapolated dynamical mass of 2.01 +0.10 −0.08 × 10^11M⊙.

Yongjun Jiao, Francois Hammer, Istiak Akib, Yanbin Yang, Haifeng Wang, "A Self-Consistent Jeans Analysis of the Milky Way Rotation Curve" arXiv:2609.30364 (September 24, 2026) (accepted by The Astrophysical Journal, September the 19th 2026).