Atmospheric neutrinos, $nu_e-nu_s$ oscillations, and a novel neutrino evolution equation
Abstract
If a sterile neutrino nu_s with an eV-scale mass and a sizeable mixing to the electron neutrino exists, as indicated by the reactor and gallium neutrino anomalies, a strong resonance enhancement of nu_e-nu_s oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos should occur in the TeV energy range. At these energies neutrino flavour transitions in the 3+1 scheme depend on just one neutrino mass squared difference and are fully described within a 3-flavour oscillation framework. We demonstrate that the flavour transitions of atmospheric nu_e can actually be very accurately described in a 2-flavour framework, with neutrino flavour evolution governed by an inhomogeneous Schroedinger-like equation. Evolution equations of this type have not been previously considered in the theory of neutrino oscillations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1606.07391,
title = {Atmospheric neutrinos, $nu_e-nu_s$ oscillations, and a novel neutrino evolution equation},
author = {Evgeny Akhmedov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.07391},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
10 pages, 2 figures. v2: typos corrected. v3: some equations in section 2 reordered, section 3 expanded, figures enhanced and figure captions improved following referee's suggestions. Matches JHEP version