Possible Neutrino-Antineutrino Oscillation Under Gravity and its Consequences

TL;DR

This paper proposes that gravity can induce neutrino-antineutrino oscillations through CPT violation, potentially impacting early universe asymmetries and astrophysical phenomena like supernovae.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism for neutrino-antineutrino oscillation driven by gravity and CPT violation, with implications for cosmology and astrophysics.

Findings

Gravity causes different effective masses for neutrino and antineutrino.

Neutrino-antineutrino oscillation can lead to matter-antimatter asymmetry in the early universe.

Potential influence on supernova dynamics and nucleosynthesis processes.

Abstract

We show that under gravity the effective masses for neutrino and antineutrino are different which opens a possible window of neutrino-antineutrino oscillation even if the rest masses of the corresponding eigenstates are same. This is due to CPT violation and possible to demonstrate if the neutrino mass eigenstates are expressed as a combination of neutrino and antineutrino eigenstates, as of the neutral kaon system, with the plausible breaking of lepton number conservation. In early universe, in presence of various lepton number violating processes, this oscillation might lead to neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry which resulted baryogenesis from the B-L symmetry by electro-weak sphaleron processes. On the other hand, for Majorana neutrinos, this oscillation is expected to affect the inner edge of neutrino dominated accretion disks around a compact object by influencing the neutrino sphere which controls the accretion dynamics, and then the related type-II supernova evolution and the r-process nucleosynthesis.