New approach to description of Majorana properties of neutral particles

TL;DR

This paper develops two mathematical models based on Pauli transformations to describe Majorana properties of neutral particles, including neutrino oscillations, generalizing earlier models and incorporating symmetries and quantum numbers.

Contribution

It introduces two novel models using Pauli transformations to describe Majorana and Dirac properties of neutral particles, extending previous frameworks and including neutrino oscillation applications.

Findings

Models describe combined Dirac-Majorana properties of neutrinos.

Pauli symmetry leads to conserved generalized lepton charge.

Modified model applicable to two-flavor neutrino oscillations.

Abstract

Two mathematical models based on Pauli transformations including U(1) chiral group and Pauli SU(2) group, that mixes particle and antiparticle states, are developed for description of Majorana properties of neutral particles. The first one describes a system, incorporating left- and right-handed fermions of the same flavor, and it is a generalization of the Majorana model of his pioneer article of 1937 year. The second describes a two-flavor neutrino system with quantum numbers of Zel'dovich-Konopinsky-Mahmoud (ZKM) type. For massless fermions the Pauli symmetry is exact and leads to the coserved generalized lepton charge. It is a Pauli isospace vector, whose different directions are coordinated with Dirac or generalized Majorana properties. In nonzero-mass case the models describe the combined Dirac-Majorana properties of neutral particles, which are characterized either by the generalized lepton charges of ZKM-type or by the eigenvalues of the operator that is the product of the charge operator and chirality. The latter is connected with operator of the structure of Lagrangian mass term or with the generalized flavor number of the second model. The choice of the basic operator depends on the inversion classes (A-B or C-C - types) of the particles with respect to the space inversion. The modified second model can be used for description of neutrino oscillation in the simplest two-flavor case.