Baseline-dependent neutrino oscillations with extra-dimensional shortcuts

TL;DR

This paper explores how extra-dimensional geometries can induce baseline-dependent neutrino oscillation resonances, potentially explaining anomalies in experimental data through a new geometric resonance mechanism.

Contribution

It introduces a specific brane-bulk metric and derives explicit geodesics, revealing a baseline-dependent resonance condition in active-sterile neutrino oscillations.

Findings

Resonance depends on the product of energy and baseline (LE)

Multiple resonance solutions can exist for given parameters

Implications for interpreting LSND and MiniBooNE data

Abstract

In extra-dimensional scenarios oscillations between active and sterile neutrinos can be governed by a new resonance in the oscillation amplitude. This resonance results when cancelation occurs between two phase differences, the usual kinematic one coming from the neutrino mass-squared difference, and a geometric one coming from the difference in travel times of the sterile neutrino through the bulk relative to the active neutrino confined to the brane. In this work we introduce a specific metric for the brane-bulk system, from which we explicitly derive extra-dimensional geodesics for the sterile neutrino, and ultimately the oscillation probability of the active-sterile two-state system. We find that for an asymmetrically-warped metric, the resonance condition involves both the neutrino energy E and the travel distance L on the brane. In other words, the resonant energy may be viewed as baseline-dependent. We show that to a good approximation, the resonance condition is not on E or on L, but rather on the product LE. The model is rich in implications, including the possibility of multiple solutions to the resonance condition, with ramifications for existing data sets, e.g., LSND and MiniBooNE. Some phenomenology with these brane-bulk resonances is discussed.