The Hypothesis of Superluminal Neutrinos: comparing OPERA with other Data

TL;DR

This paper examines the implications of superluminal neutrino hypotheses, specifically tachyonic and Coleman-Glashow models, in light of OPERA data and other experimental constraints, highlighting significant theoretical challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of superluminal neutrino models against experimental data, revealing conflicts with neutrino production and oscillation phenomena.

Findings

Tachyonic interpretation conflicts with energy dependence data.

Superluminal neutrinos challenge pion decay kinematics.

Coleman-Glashow model struggles to explain neutrino oscillations.

Abstract

The OPERA Collaboration reported evidence for muonic neutrinos traveling slightly faster than light in vacuum. While waiting further checks from the experimental community, here we aim at exploring some theoretical consequences of the hypothesis that muonic neutrinos are superluminal, considering in particular the tachyonic and the Coleman-Glashow cases. We show that a tachyonic interpretation is not only hardly reconciled with OPERA data on energy dependence, but that it clashes with neutrino production from pion and with neutrino oscillations. A Coleman-Glashow superluminal neutrino beam would also have problems with pion decay kinematics for the OPERA setup; it could be easily reconciled with SN1987a data, but then it would be very problematic to account for neutrino oscillations.