Interaction of Neutrinos with a Cosmological K-essence Scalar

Abstract

In this paper we study a novel means of coupling neutrinos to a Lorentz violating background k-essence field. We first look into the effect that k-essence has on the neutrino dispersion relation and derive a general formula for the neutrino velocity in the presence on a k-essence background. The influence of k-essence coupling on neutrino oscillations is then considered. It is found that a non-diagonal k-essence coupling leads to an oscillation length that goes like λ\sim E^{-1} where E is the energy. This should be contrasted with the λ\sim E dependence seen in the standard mass-induced mechanism of neutrino oscillations. While such a scenario is not favored experimentally, it places constraints on the interactions of the neutrino with a cosmological k-essence scalar background by requiring it to be flavor diagonal. All non-trivial physical effects discussed here require the speed of sound to be different from the speed of light and hence are primarily a consequence of Lorentz violation.

24 pages

References in corpus (5)

• k-Essence, superluminal propagation, causality and emergent geometry
• No-go theorem for k-essence dark energy
• Constraints on the Sound Speed of Dynamical Dark Energy
• Dark-Matter-Induced Weak Equivalence Principle Violation
• Dark Energy-Dark Matter Interaction from the Abell Cluster A586 and violation of the Equivalence Principle

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Degeneracy, matter coupling, and disformal transformations in scalar-tensor theories
• Price for Environmental Neutrino-Superluminality
• Lorentz Invariance Violation in Modified Gravity
• Neutrino Lorentz invariance violation from the CPT-even SME coefficients through a tensor interaction with cosmological scalar fields