Gamma-ray bursts and the relevance of rotation-induced neutrino sterilization

Abstract

A la Pontecorvo when one defines electroweak flavour states of neutrinos as a linear superposition of mass eigenstates one ignores the associated spin. If, however, there is a significant rotation between the neutrino source, and the detector, a negative helicity state emitted by the former acquires a non-zero probability amplitude to be perceived as a positive helicity state by the latter. Both of these states are still in the left-Weyl sector of the Lorentz group. The electroweak interaction cross sections for such helicity-flipped states are suppressed by a factor of $(m_{\nu }/E_{\nu }{)}^2$, where $m_{\nu }$ is the expectation value of the neutrino mass, and $E_{\nu }$ is the associated energy. Thus, if the detecting process is based on electroweak interactions, and the neutrino source is a highly rotating object, the rotation-induced helicity flip becomes very significant in interpreting the data. The effect immediately generalizes to anti-neutrinos. Motivated by these observations we present a generalization of the Pontecorvo formalism and discuss its relevance in the context of recent data obtained by the IceCube neutrino telescope.

arXiv comment4 pages

References in corpus (6)

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• On the acceleration of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays in Gamma Ray Bursts
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Three-generation neutrino oscillations in curved spacetime
• Neutrino Helicity Reversal and Fundamental Symmetries