English

Constraint on super-luminal neutrinos from vacuum Cerenkov processes

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2011-12-19 v4

Abstract

We examine the Cerenkov-like emission of e+ee^+ e^- from muon super-luminal muon neutrinos assuming a quadratic energy dependence of the neutrino velocity arising from Lorentz violating interactions. We find that with the OPERA result for the neutrino-photon velocity difference, the decay length for the process νμνμe+e\nu_\mu\rightarrow \nu_\mu e^+ e^- is 17,039 km which is much larger than the OPERA neutrinos path length of 730 km. We also calculate the pion rate for super-luminal outgoing neutrinos, and we find that the deviation of the pion decay length from the standard Lorentz conserving case at the OPERA neutrino energy is 2%. We conclude that if the muon-neutrino velocity has a quadratic energy dependence, then OPERA result is consistent with non-observation of forbidden neutrino decays and large deviations from the standard pion decay lifetime.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1111.2725,
  title  = {Constraint on super-luminal neutrinos from vacuum Cerenkov processes},
  author = {Subhendra Mohanty and Soumya Rao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.2725},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

13 pages, equations added and numerical factors corrected