Enhanced tau neutrino appearance through invisible decay

Abstract

The decay of neutrino mass eigenstates leads to a change of the conversion and survival probability of neutrino flavor eigenstates. Remarkably, we find that the neutrino decay provides an enhancement of the expected tau appearance signal with respect to the standard oscillation scenario for the long-baseline OPERA experiment. The increase of the ${\nu }_{\mu }\to {\nu }_{\tau }$ conversion probability by the decay of one of the mass eigenstates is due to a reduction of the "destructive interference" among the different massive neutrino components. Motivated by the recently released results of the OPERA Collaboration showing a number of observed ${\nu }_{\tau }$ events larger than expected, we perform a statistical analysis including the invisible decay hypothesis. We obtain a very mild preference for invisible decays, with a best fit value ${\tau }_3/m_3\simeq 2.6\times 10^{-13}$ s/eV, and a constraint at the 90$\%$ confidence level for the neutrino decay lifetime to be ${\tau }_3/m_3\gtrsim 1.3\times 10^{-13}$ s/eV.

5 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Invisible Neutrino Decay Resolves IceCube's Track and Cascade Tension
• Snowmass White Paper: Beyond the Standard Model effects on Neutrino Flavor
• Tau Neutrinos in the Next Decade: from GeV to EeV
• Visible Decay of Astrophysical Neutrinos at IceCube
• How to Identify Different New Neutrino Oscillation Physics Scenarios at DUNE
• Neutrino Invisible Decay at DUNE: a multi-channel analysis
• Constraining visible neutrino decay at KamLAND and JUNO
• Damping signatures at JUNO, a medium-baseline reactor neutrino oscillation experiment