Superluminal group velocity through near-maximal neutrino oscillations

TL;DR

The paper investigates whether superluminal neutrino velocities can result from near-maximal oscillations, concluding that while such effects exist in narrow energy ranges, they cannot account for the OPERA experiment's superluminal observations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that superluminal group velocities due to neutrino oscillations occur only in narrow energy ranges and are insufficient to explain OPERA's results.

Findings

Superluminal group velocities occur in narrow energy ranges.

Oscillation effects cannot explain OPERA's superluminal neutrino measurements.

Neutrino oscillation effects are limited in explaining superluminal observations.

Abstract

Recently it was suggested that the observation of superluminal neutrinos by the OPERA collaboration may be due to group velocity effects resulting from close-to-maximal oscillation between neutrino mass eigenstates, in analogy to known effects in optics. We show that superluminal propagation does occur through this effect for a series of very narrow energy ranges, but this phenomenum cannot explain the OPERA measurement.