English

Neutrino Oscillations in Matter using the Adjugate of the Hamiltonian

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2023-09-29 v2

Abstract

We revisit neutrino oscillations in constant matter density for a number of different scenarios: three flavors with the standard Wolfenstein matter potential, four flavors with standard matter potential and three flavors with non-standard matter potentials. To calculate the oscillation probabilities for these scenarios one must determine the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Hamiltonians. We use a method for calculating the eigenvalues that is well known, determination of the zeros of determinant of matrix (λIH)(\lambda I -H), where H is the Hamiltonian, I the identity matrix and λ\lambda is a scalar. To calculate the associated eigenvectors we use a method that is little known in the particle physics community, the calculation of the adjugate (transpose of the cofactor matrix) of the same matrix, (λIH)(\lambda I -H). This method can be applied to any Hamiltonian, but provides a very simple way to determine the eigenvectors for neutrino oscillation in matter, independent of the complexity of the matter potential. This method can be trivially automated using the Faddeev-LeVerrier algorithm for numerical calculations. For the above scenarios we derive a number of quantities that are invariant of the matter potential, many are new such as the generalization of the Naumov-Harrison-Scott identity for four or more flavors of neutrinos. We also show how these matter potential independent quantities become matter potential dependent when off-diagonal non-standard matter effects are included.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.12565,
  title  = {Neutrino Oscillations in Matter using the Adjugate of the Hamiltonian},
  author = {Asli Abdullahi and Stephen J. Parke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.12565},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

34 pages. This is the published version of this paper