This is the report of neutrino and astroparticle physics working group at WHEPP-8. We present the discussions carried out during the workshop on selected topics in the above fields and also indicate progress made subsequently. The neutrino physics subgroup studied the possibilities of constraining neutrino masses, mixing and CPT violation in lepton sector from future experiments. Neutrino mass models in the context of Abelian horizontal symmetries, warped extra dimensions and in the presence of triplet Higgs were studied. Effect of threshold corrections on radiative magnification of mixing angles was investigated. The astroparticle physics subgroup focused on how various particle physics inputs affect the CMBR fluctuation spectrum, and on brane cosmology. This report also contains an introduction on how to use the publicly available code CMBFAST to calculate the CMBR fluctuations.

This is the report of the cosmology and astroparticle physics working group at WHEPPXI. We present the discussions carried out during the workshop on selected topics in the above fields. The problems discussed concerned axions, infrared divergences in inflationary theories, supersonic bubbles in a first-order electroweak phase transition, dark matter, MOND, interacting dark energy, composite Higgs models and statistical anisotropy of the Universe.

Polarization property is important to the optical imaging system. It has recently been understood that the polarization properties of light can be fruitfully used for improving the characteristics of imaging system that includes polarizing devices. The vector wave imagery lends an additional degree of freedom that can be utilized for obtaining results that are unobtainable in scalar wave imagery. This calls for a systematic study of diffraction properties of different apertures using polarization-sensitive devices. In the present paper, we have studied the Fraunhofer diffraction pattern of slits masked by different kinds of polarizing devices which introduce a phase difference between the two orthogonal components of the incident beam.