MINOS Anomaly as A Signal of Lorentz Violation

TL;DR

This paper proposes that Lorentz symmetry violation could explain the MINOS neutrino anomaly, predicting energy-independent oscillation patterns at high energies, which aligns with observed discrepancies between neutrino and antineutrino oscillations.

Contribution

It introduces a Lorentz violation framework as a perturbation to neutrino oscillations to explain the MINOS anomaly, providing novel theoretical insights.

Findings

Lorentz violation can account for the MINOS anomaly

High-energy neutrino oscillations become energy-independent

The model aligns with experimental observations

Abstract

Recently, the MINOS collaboration reported an anomaly that the mass-squared difference and mixing angle of $\bar{\nu}_\mu$ $\leftrightarrow$ $\bar{\nu}_\tau$ are both different from that of $\nu_\mu$ $\leftrightarrow$ $\nu_\tau$. In this paper, based on the framework of neutrino oscillations, terms that break the Lorentz symmetry are used as perturbation to explain this anomaly and satisfactory results are got. Remarkably, some surprising conclusions, one of which is that in the high energy limit (hundreds of GeV) neutrino oscillation pattern will be independent of energy, are also arrived.