English

Probing the Planck Scale with Neutrino Oscillations

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-11-07 v2 Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Quantum gravity "foam", among its various generic Lorentz non-invariant effects, would cause neutrino mixing. It is shown here that, if the foam is manifested as a nonrenormalizable effect at scale M, the oscillation length generically decreases with energy EE as (E/M)^(-2). Neutrino observatories and long-baseline experiments should have therefore already observed foam-induced oscillations, even if M is as high as the Planck energy scale. The null results, which can be further strengthened by better analysis of current data and future experiments, can be taken as experimental evidence that Lorentz invariance is fully preserved at the Planck scale, as is the case in critical string theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0106309,
  title  = {Probing the Planck Scale with Neutrino Oscillations},
  author = {Ram Brustein and David Eichler and Stefano Foffa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0106309},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

11 pages, 2 figures. Final version published in PRD. 1 figure, references, clarifications and explanations added. Results unchanged