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Register a new userDistinguishing Dirac and Majorana neutrinos with astrophysical fluxes
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Massive neutrinos can have helicity $s_{parallel} eq -1$. Neutrino helicity changes when the neutrino interacts with an external magnetic field and it is possible that the left-handed neutrinos born inside the Sun or a supernova could leave their sources with a different helicity. Since Dirac and Majorana neutrinos have different cross sections in the scattering on electrons for different neutrino helicities, a change in the final neutrino helicity may generate a different number of events and spectra in terrestrial detectors when astrophysical neutrinos have travelled regions with strong magnetic fields. In this work, we show that looking for these effects in solar neutrinos, it could be possible to set bounds in the neutrino properties such as the neutrino magnetic moment. Furthermore, for neutrinos coming from a supernova, we show that even in the case of an extremely small neutrino magnetic moment, $mu_ u sim 10^{-19}mu_B$, there will be measurable differences in both the number of events and in the spectra of Majorana and Dirac neutrinos.
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Neutrinos may acquire small Dirac or Majorana masses by new low-energy physics in terms of the chiral gravitational anomaly, as proposed by Dvali and Funcke (2016). This model predicts fast neutrino decays, $ u_ito u_j+phi$ and $ u_itobar{ u}_j+phi$, where the gravi-majorons $phi$ are pseudoscalar Nambu-Goldstone bosons. The final-state neutrino and antineutrino distributions differ depending on the Dirac or Majorana mass of the initial state. This opens a channel for distinguishing these cases, for example in the spectrum of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. In particular, we put bounds on the neutrino lifetimes in the Majorana case, ${tau_2}/{m_2}> 1.1times 10^{-3}(6.7times 10^{-4})~{rm s/eV}$ and ${tau_3}/{m_3}> 2.2times 10^{-5}(1.3times 10^{-4})~{rm s/eV}$ at 90% CL for hierarchical (degenerate) masses, using data from experiments searching for antineutrino appearance from the Sun.
We analize the non-cyclic geometric phase for neutrinos. We find that the geometric phase and the total phase associated to the mixing phenomenon provide a tool to distinguish between Dirac and Majorana neutrinos. Our results hold for neutrinos propagating in vacuum and through the matter. Future experiments, based on interferometry, could reveal the nature of neutrinos.
It is well known that Majorana neutrinos have a pure axial neutral current interaction while Dirac neutrinos have the standard vector-axial interaction. In spite of this crucial difference, usually Dirac neutrino processes differ from Majorana processes by a term proportional to the neutrino mass, resulting in almost unmeasurable observations of this difference. In the present work we show that once the neutrino polarization evolution is considered, there are clear differences between Dirac and Majorana scattering on electrons. The change of polarization can be achieved in astrophysical environments with strong magnetic fields. Furthermore, we show that in the case of unpolarized neutrino scattering onto polarized electrons, this difference can be relevant even for large values of the neutrino energy.
We propose two new simple lepton flavor models in the framework of the $S_4$ flavor symmetry. The neutrino mass matrices, which are given by two complex parameters, lead to the inverted mass hierarchy. The charged lepton mass matrix has the 1-2 lepton flavor mixing, which gives the non-vanishing reactor angle $theta_{13}$. These models predict the Dirac phase and the Majorana phases, which are testable in the future experiments. The predicted magnitudes of the effective neutrino mass for the neutrino-less double beta decay are in the regions as $32~text{meV}lesssim |m_{ee}|lesssim 49~text{meV}$ and $34~text{meV}lesssim |m_{ee}|lesssim 59~text{meV}$, respectively. These values are close to the expected reaches of the coming experiments. The total sum of the neutrino masses are predicted in both models as $0.0952~text{eV}lesssim sum m_ilesssim 0.101~text{eV}$ and $0.150~text{eV}lesssim sum m_ilesssim 0.160~text{eV}$, respectively.
Flavor ratios of very high energy astrophysical neutrinos, which can be studied at the Earth by a neutrino telescope such as IceCube, can serve to diagnose their production mechanism at the astrophysical source. The flavor ratios for neutrinos and antineutrinos can be quite different as we do not know how they are produced in the astrophysical environment. Due to this uncertainty the neutrino and antineutrino flavor ratios at the Earth also could be quite different. Nonetheless, it is generally assumed that flavor ratios for neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same at the Earth, in fitting the high energy astrophysical neutrino data. This is a reasonable assumption for the limited statistics for the data we currently have. However, in the future the fit must be performed allowing for a possible discrepancy in these two fractions in order to be able to disentangle different production mechanisms at the source from new physics in the neutrino sector. To reinforce this issue, in this work we show that a wrong assumption about the distribution of neutrino flavor ratios at the Earth may indeed lead to misleading interpretations of IceCube results.
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