Scattering processes could distinguish Majorana from Dirac neutrinos

Abstract

It is well known that Majorana neutrinos have a pure axial neutral current interaction while Dirac neutrinos have the standard vector-axial interaction. In spite of this crucial difference, usually Dirac neutrino processes differ from Majorana processes by a term proportional to the neutrino mass, resulting in almost unmeasurable observations of this difference. In the present work we show that once the neutrino polarization evolution is considered, there are clear differences between Dirac and Majorana scattering on electrons. The change of polarization can be achieved in astrophysical environments with strong magnetic fields. Furthermore, we show that in the case of unpolarized neutrino scattering onto polarized electrons, this difference can be relevant even for large values of the neutrino energy.

arXiv comment12 pages, 5 figures

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• Evolution of Primordial Neutrino Helicities in Astrophysical Magnetic Fields and Implications for their Detection
• Neutrino elastic scattering on polarized electrons as a tool for probing the neutrino nature
• Probing neutrino nature at Borexino detector with chromium neutrino source
• Azimuthal asymmetry of recoil electrons in neutrino-electron elastic scattering as signature of neutrino nature
• Recoil electron polarization-dependent T-odd correlations in neutrino elastic scattering on polarized electron target