Analytic treatment of 3-flavor neutrino oscillation and decay in matter

Abstract

We present compact analytic expressions for 3-flavor neutrino oscillation probabilities with invisible neutrino decay, where matter effects have been explicitly included. We take into account the possibility that the oscillation and decay components of the effective Hamiltonian do not commute. This is achieved by employing the techniques of inverse Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff (BCH) expansion and the Cayley-Hamilton theorem applied in the 3-flavor framework. If only the vacuum mass eigenstate ${\nu }_3$ decays, we show that the treatment of neutrino propagation may be reduced to an effective 2-flavor analysis in the One Mass Scale Dominance (OMSD) approximation. The oscillation probabilities for $P_{\mu \mu }$, $P_{ee}$, $P_{e\mu }$ and $P_{\mu e}$ -- relevant for reactor, long baseline and atmospheric neutrino experiments -- are obtained as perturbative expansions for the case of only ${\nu }_3$ decay, as well as for the more general scenario where all components of the decay matrix are non-zero. The analytic results thus obtained match the exact numerical results for constant density matter to a high precision and provide physical insights into possible effects of the decay of neutrinos as they propagate through Earth matter. We find that the effects of neutrino decay are most likely to be observable in $P_{\mu \mu }$. We also point out that at any long baseline, the oscillation dips in $P_{\mu \mu }$ can show higher survival probabilities in the case with decay than without decay, and explain this feature using our analytic approximations.

arXiv comment35 pages, 6 figures, references updated in v2 (no other changes)

References in corpus (41)

• The fate of hints: updated global analysis of three-flavor neutrino oscillations
• 2020 Global reassessment of the neutrino oscillation picture
• Breaking Eight-fold Degeneracies in Neutrino CP Violation, Mixing, and Mass Hierarchy
• Series expansions for three-flavor neutrino oscillation probabilities in matter
• Do solar neutrinos decay?
• Neutrino Decay as an Explanation of Atmospheric Neutrino Observations
• Atmospheric neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande and parametric resonance in neutrino oscillations
• Neutrino Factories and the "Magic" Baseline
• Status of Oscillation plus Decay of Atmospheric and Long-Baseline Neutrinos
• Efficient computation of the Zassenhaus formula
• Constraining invisible neutrino decays with the cosmic microwave background
• Neutrino Decay and Atmospheric Neutrinos
• Three flavor neutrino oscillations in matter
• Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations, theta(13) and Neutrino Mass Hierarchy
• A combined treatment of neutrino decay and neutrino oscillations
• Earth Matter Effects at Very Long Baselines and the Neutrino Mass Hierarchy
• Invisible Neutrino Decay Resolves IceCube's Track and Cascade Tension
• Neutrino decay confronts the SNO data
• Cosmological Constraints on Invisible Neutrino Decays Revisited
• Constraints on neutrino decay lifetime using long-baseline charged and neutral current data
• Solar Neutrinos and the Decaying Neutrino Hypothesis
• Super-Kamiokande data and atmospheric neutrino decay
• Constraints on decay plus oscillation solutions of the solar neutrino problem
• Are cosmological neutrinos free-streaming?
• Invisible neutrino decay in precision cosmology
• Neutrino Decay and Solar Neutrino Seasonal Effect
• Invisible neutrino decay in the light of NOvA and T2K data
• Explanation for the low flux of high energy astrophysical muon-neutrinos
• MSW mediated neutrino decay and the solar neutrino problem
• Status of the neutrino decay solution to the solar neutrino problem
• Neutrino oscillation probabilities through the looking glass
• Solar Neutrino Decay
• Constraining the invisible neutrino decay with KM3NeT-ORCA
• Sensitivity to neutrino decay with atmospheric neutrinos at INO
• Non-Unitary Neutrino Propagation From Neutrino Decay
• Do Neutrinos Decay?
• Is neutrino decay really ruled out as a solution to the atmospheric neutrino problem from Super-Kamiokande data?
• Neutrino Invisible Decay at DUNE: a multi-channel analysis
• Neutrino propagation when mass eigenstates and decay eigenstates mismatch
• Explicit Description of the Zassenhaus Formula
• Testing whether muon neutrino flavor mixing is maximal

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Probing invisible neutrino decay with KM3NeT-ORCA
• Study of large extra dimension and neutrino decay at P2SO experiment
• Revisiting series expansions of neutrino oscillation and decay probabilities in matter
• Majorana CP Violation Insights from Decaying Neutrinos
• Majorana CP-violating phases and NSI effects in Neutrino Decay