Superluminal Neutrinos in the Minimal Standard Model Extension

TL;DR

This paper explores the possibility of superluminal muon neutrinos within the minimal Standard Model Extension, fitting models to experimental data and addressing conflicts with supernova neutrino observations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the minimal Standard Model Extension can account for superluminal neutrino velocities observed in experiments.

Findings

Minimal Standard Model Extension fits OPERA and other neutrino data well.

The model explains superluminal velocities without contradicting known physics.

Two solutions are proposed to reconcile superluminal neutrinos with supernova observations.

Abstract

Most recently, the measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam shows unexpected indication, that the muon neutrino velocity, $v_{\nu}$, exceeds the velocity of light in the vacuum, $c$, which is obviously in contradiction with the most basic hypothesis of modern physics. Within the framework of minimal Standard Model Extension, we discuss the modified dispersion relation and consequently the velocity-energy relation of muon neutrinos. The simplified models are fit to the OPERA data, Fermilab experiment and MINO data. We find that minimal Standard Extension can describe these long baseline superluminal neutrinos to a good accuracy. For the well-known tension between the OPERA measurement and the Supernova 1987A neutrino observation, we discussed two ways out of the contradiction.