Cosmological bounds on tachyonic neutrinos

Abstract

Recent time-of-flight measurements on muon neutrinos in the OPERA neutrino oscillation experiment have found anomalously short times compared to the light travel-times, corresponding to a superluminal velocity, $v-1=2.37\pm 0.32\times 10^{-5}$ in units where $c=1$. We show that cosmological bounds rule out an explanation involving a Lorentz invariant tachyonic neutrino. At the OPERA energy scale, nucleosynthesis constraints imply $v-1<0.86\times 10^{-12}$ and the Cosmic Microwave Background observations imply $v-1<7.1\times 10^{-23}$. The CMB limit on the velocity of a tachyon with an energy of 10 MeV is stronger than the SN1987A limit. Superluminal neutrinos that could be observed at particle accelerator energy scales would have to be associated with Lorentz symmetry violation.

LaTeX, 4 pages

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• Implications of ultra-high energy neutrino flux constraints for Lorentz-invariance violating cosmogenic neutrinos
• Evidence for two neutrino mass eigenstates from SN 1987A and the possibility of superluminal neutrinos
• Prospective Constraints on Neutrino Masses from a Core-Collapse Supernova
• Lepton-pair Cerenkov radiation emitted by tachyonic neutrinos: Lorentz-covariant approach and IceCube data
• Sterile neutrino fits to dark matter mass profiles in the Milky Way and in galaxy clusters
• The Lorentz factor in a reverse coordinate system