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Register a new userDistinguishing Dirac and Majorana neutrinos by their gravi-majoron decays
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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.
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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.
Higgs boson decays in flexible brane world models with stable, massive gravi-vectors are considered. Such vectors couple bilinearly to the Standard Model fields through either the Standard Model energy-momentum tensor, the weak hypercharge field strength or the Higgs scalar. The role of the coupling involving the extrinsic curvature is highlighted. It is found that within the presently allowed parameter space, the decay rate of the Higgs into two gravi-vectors (which would appear as an invisible Higgs decay) can be comparable to the rate for any of the Standard Model decay modes.
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.
Nonzero neutrino masses imply the existence of degrees of freedom and interactions beyond those in the Standard Model. A powerful indicator of what these might be is the nature of the massive neutrinos: Dirac fermions versus Majorana fermions. While addressing the nature of neutrinos is often associated with searches for lepton-number violation, there are several other features that distinguish Majorana from Dirac fermions. Here, we compute in great detail the kinematics of the daughters of the decays into charged-leptons and neutrinos of hypothetical heavy neutral leptons at rest. We allow for the decay to be mediated by the most general four-fermion interaction Lagrangian. We demonstrate, for example, that when the daughter charged-leptons have the same flavor or the detector is insensitive to their charges, polarized Majorana-fermion decays have zero forward/backward asymmetry in the direction of the outgoing neutrino (relative to the parent spin), whereas Dirac-fermion decays can have large asymmetries. Going beyond studying forward/backward asymmetries, we also explore the fully-differential width of the three-body decays. It contains a wealth of information not only about the nature of the new fermions but also the nature of the interactions behind their decays.
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