Testing neutrino instability with active galactic nuclei

Abstract

Active galactic nuclei and gamma ray bursts at cosmological distances are sources of high-energy electron and muon neutrinos and provide a unique test bench for neutrino instability. The typical lifetime-to-mass ratio one can reach there is $\tau /m\sim 500Mpc/c{E}_{\nu }\sim 500$ s/eV. We study the rapid decay channel ${\nu }_i\to {\nu }_j+\varphi$, where $\varphi$ is a massless or very light scalar (possibly a Goldstone boson), and point out that one can test the coupling strength of $g_{ij}{\nu }_i{\nu }_j$ down to $g_{ij}\lsim 10^{-8} eV/m$ by measuring the relative fluxes of ${\nu }_e$, ${\nu }_{\mu }$ and ${\nu }_{\tau }$. This is orders of magnitude more stringent bound than what one can obtain in other phenomena, e.g. in neutrinoless double beta decay with scalar emission.

3 pages

References in corpus (4)

• Evidence for oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos
• Tau Neutrino Appearance with a 1000 Megaparsec Baseline
• Neutrino Decay as an Explanation of Atmospheric Neutrino Observations
• Testing exotic neutrino-neutrino interactions with AGN neutrinos

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Decay of High-Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Effects of neutrino mixing on high-energy cosmic neutrino flux
• Do solar neutrinos decay?
• Effects of sterile neutrinos on the ultrahigh-energy cosmic neutrino flux
• Flavor Composition of UHE Neutrinos at Source and at Neutrino Telescopes
• MiniBooNE Results and Neutrino Schemes with 2 sterile Neutrinos: Possible Mass Orderings and Observables related to Neutrino Masses
• Neutrino Flavor Goniometry by High Energy Astrophysical Beams
• Neutrino mixing scenarios and AGN
• Neutrino Properties from High Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Neutrino properties from high energy astrophysical neutrinos