Operatorial characterization of Majorana neutrinos
Abstract
The Majorana neutrino when constructed as a superposition of chiral fermions such as is characterized by , and the CP symmetry describes the entire physics contents of Majorana neutrinos. Further specifications of C and P separately could lead to difficulties depending on the choice of C and P. The conventional with well-defined P is naturally defined when one constructs the Majorana neutrino from the Dirac-type fermion. In the seesaw model of Type I or Type I+II where the same number of left- and right-handed chiral fermions appear, it is possible to use the generalized Pauli-Gursey transformation to rewrite the seesaw Lagrangian in terms of Dirac-type fermions only; the conventional C symmetry then works to define Majorana neutrinos. In contrast, the "pseudo C-symmetry" (and associated "pseudo P-symmetry"), that has been often used in both the seesaw model and Weinberg's model to describe Majorana neutrinos, attempts to assign a nontrivial charge conjugation transformation rule to each chiral fermion separately. But this common construction is known to be operatorially ill-defined and, for example, the amplitude of the neutrinoless double beta decay vanishes if the vacuum is assumed to be invariant under the pseudo C-symmetry.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1910.03189,
title = {Operatorial characterization of Majorana neutrinos},
author = {Kazuo Fujikawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.03189},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
25 pages. Substantially expanded to explain the subject in more detail. This version is to be published in European Physical Journal C