Flavor coupled with chiral oscillations in the presence of an external magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how chiral oscillations, combined with flavor oscillations, are affected by an external magnetic field in neutrinos, revealing small modifications to standard flavor conversion formulas.

Contribution

It introduces a wave-packet approach incorporating fermionic nature and magnetic interactions, providing a detailed quantification of flavor and chiral oscillations in external magnetic fields.

Findings

Chiral oscillations cause small deviations in flavor conversion probabilities.

External magnetic fields influence the interplay between flavor and chiral oscillations.

The wave-packet formalism effectively captures these effects in neutrino propagation.

Abstract

By reporting to the Dirac wave-packet prescription where it is formally assumed the {\em fermionic} nature of the particles, we shall demonstrate that chiral oscillations implicitly aggregated to the interference between positive and negative frequency components of mass-eigenstate wave-packets introduce some small modifications to the standard neutrino flavor conversion formula. Assuming the correspondent spinorial solutions of a ``modified'' Dirac equation, we are specifically interested in quantifying flavor coupled with chiral oscillations for a {\em fermionic} Dirac-{\em type} particle (neutrino) non-minimally coupling with an external magnetic field {\boldmath$B$}. The viability of the intermediate wave-packet treatment becomes clear when we assume {\boldmath$B$} orthogonal/parallel to the direction of the propagating particle.