Probing the Planck Scale with Neutrino Oscillations

Abstract

Quantum gravity "foam", among its various generic Lorentz non-invariant effects, would cause neutrino mixing. It is shown here that, if the foam is manifested as a nonrenormalizable effect at scale M, the oscillation length generically decreases with energy $E$ as (E/M)^(-2). Neutrino observatories and long-baseline experiments should have therefore already observed foam-induced oscillations, even if M is as high as the Planck energy scale. The null results, which can be further strengthened by better analysis of current data and future experiments, can be taken as experimental evidence that Lorentz invariance is fully preserved at the Planck scale, as is the case in critical string theory.

11 pages, 2 figures. Final version published in PRD. 1 figure, references, clarifications and explanations added. Results unchanged

References in corpus (2)

• Detection of Accelerator-Produced Neutrinos at a Distance of 250 km
• Non-Critical Liouville String Escapes Constraints on Generic Models of Quantum Gravity

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