Constraints and tests of the OPERA superluminal neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper examines the implications of OPERA's superluminal neutrino detection, showing that it constrains Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) and affects neutrino production and decay, with implications for future astrophysical observations.

Contribution

It provides new constraints on LIV parameters based on neutrino energy and spectrum measurements, linking OPERA results to broader neutrino physics implications.

Findings

OPERA's superluminal neutrinos imply large LIV that forbids certain neutrino production processes above 5 GeV.

OPERA data constrains LIV parameter to less than 3×10^{-7} at 40 GeV neutrino energy.

IceCube atmospheric neutrino spectrum limits LIV parameter to 10^{-12}.

Abstract

The superluminal neutrinos detected by OPERA indicates Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) of the neutrino sector at the order of $10^{-5}$. We study the implications of the result in this work. We find that such a large LIV implied by OPERA data will make the neutrino production process $\pi \to \mu + \nu_\mu$ kinematically forbidden for neutrino energy greater than about 5 GeV. The OPERA detection of neutrinos at 40 GeV can constrain the LIV parameter to be smaller than $3\times 10^{-7}$. Furthermore the neutrino decay in the LIV framework will modify the neutrino spectrum greatly. The atmospheric neutrino spectrum measured by IceCube can constrain the LIV parameter to the level of $10^{-12}$. The future detection of astrophysical neutrinos of Galactic sources is expected to be able to give even stronger constraint on the LIV parameter of neutrinos.