Massive Majorana neutrinos in matter and a magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent theoretical methods for describing the evolution of Majorana neutrinos in external fields, including quantum and relativistic approaches, and derives effective Hamiltonians for spin-flavor oscillations.

Contribution

It introduces exact solutions for Weyl fields in matter, derives an effective Hamiltonian for Majorana neutrino oscillations, and compares quantum and relativistic methods for external field interactions.

Findings

Exact solutions for Weyl fields in matter obtained.

Effective Hamiltonian for spin-flavor oscillations derived.

Relativistic quantum mechanics approach effectively describes oscillations.

Abstract

We summarize our recent results on the description of the evolution of Majorana neutrinos in external fields. First we discuss the purely quantum method which involves the secondly quantized Weyl spinors. In frames of this formalism we find exact solutions of the classical Hamilton equations for Weyl fields in background matter, which then are used to canonically quantize the system. The analog of the effective Hamiltonian for the description of spin-flavor oscillations of Majorana neutrinos in matter and a magnetic field is also obtained. Finally we discuss another approach for the treatment of Majorana neutrinos in external fields, which is based on the relativistic quantum mechanics. The latter method does not require the quantization of the neutrino wave function. Nevertheless we demonstrate that the relativistic quantum mechanics approach also appropriately describes spin-flavor oscillations of relativistic Majorana neutrinos.