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 neutrino physics working group at WHEPP-X. We summarize the problems selected and discussed at the workshop and the papers which have resulted subsequently.

The 10th Workshop on High Energy Physics Phenomenology (WHEPP-10) was held at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai during January 2–13, 2008. One of our working grops (WG) is QCD and QGP. The discussions of QGP WG include matter at high density, lattice QCD, charmonium states in QGP, viscous hydrodynamics and jet quenching, colour factor in heavy ion collisions and RHIC results on photons, dileptons and heavy quark. There were two plenary talks and several working group talks with intense discussions regarding the future activities that are going to be persued.

The prediction of Hoyle state was necessitated to explain the abundance of carbon, which is crucial for the existence of life on Earth and is the stepping stone for understanding the abundance of other heavier elements. After the experimental confirmation of its existence, soon it was realized that the Hoyle state was `different’ from other excited states of carbon, which led to intense theoretical and experimental activities over the past few decades to understand its structure. In recent times, precision, high statistics experiments on the decay of Hoyle state have been performed at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, to determine the quantitative contributions of various direct $3\alpha$ decay mechanisms of the Hoyle state. The present results have been critically compared with those obtained in other recent experiments and their implications have been discussed.

Study of quasifission reaction mechanism and shell effects in compound nuclei has important implications on the synthesis of superheavy elements (SHE). Using the major accelerator facilities available in India, quasifission reaction mechanism and shell effects in compound nuclei were studied extensively. Fission fragment mass distribution was used as a probe. Two factors, viz., nuclear orientation and direction of mass flow of the initial dinuclear system after capture were seen to determine the extent of quasifission. From the measurement of fragment mass distribution in 𝛼-induced reaction on actinide targets, it was possible to constrain the excitation energy at which nuclear shell effect washed out.