English

Revisiting pseudo-Dirac neutrinos

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2011-07-19 v2

Abstract

We study the pseudo-Dirac mixing of left and right-handed neutrinos in the case where the Majorana masses M_L and M_R are small when compared with the Dirac mass, M_D. The light Majorana masses could be generated by a non-renormalizable operator reflecting effects of new physics at some high energy scale. In this context, we obtain a simple model independent closed bound for M_D. A phenomenologically consistent scenario is achieved with M_L,M_R ~ 10^{-7} eV and M_D ~ 10^{-5}-10^{-4} eV. This precludes the possibility of positive mass searches in the planned future experiments like GENIUS or in tritium decay experiments. If on the other hand, GENIUS does observe a positive signal for a Majorana mass \geq 10^{-3} eV, then with very little fine tuning of neutrino parameters, the scale of new physics could be in the TeV range, but pseudo-Dirac scenario in that case is excluded. We briefly discuss the constraints from cosmology when a fraction of the dark matter is composed of nearly degenerate neutrinos.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0110314,
  title  = {Revisiting pseudo-Dirac neutrinos},
  author = {K. R. S. Balaji and Anna Kalliomaki and Jukka Maalampi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0110314},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

17 pages, no figures, references added, to be published in PLB

R2 v1 2026-07-22T13:37:01.062Z