Neutrinos with Lorentz-violating operators of arbitrary dimension

Abstract

The behavior of fermions in the presence of Lorentz and CPT violation is studied. Allowing for operatorsof any mass dimension, we classify all Lorentz-violating terms in the quadratic Lagrange density for free fermions. The result is adapted to obtain the effective Hamiltonian describing the propagation and mixing of three flavors of left-handed neutrinos in the presence of Lorentz violation involving operators of arbitrary mass dimension. A characterization of the neutrino coefficients for Lorentz violation is provided via a decomposition using spin-weighted spherical harmonics. The restriction of the general theory to various special cases is discussed, including among others the renormalizable limit, the massless scenario, flavor-blind and oscillation-free models, the diagonalizable case, and several isotropic limits. The formalism is combined with existing data on neutrino oscillations and kinematics to extract a variety of measures of coefficients for Lorentz and CPT violation. For oscillations, we use results from the short-baseline experiments LSND and MiniBooNE to obtain explicit sensitivities to effects from flavor-mixing Lorentz-violating operators up to mass dimension 10, and we present methods to analyze data from long-baseline experiments. For propagation, we use time-of-flight measurements from the supernova SN1987A and from a variety of experiments including MINOS and OPERA to constrain oscillation-free Lorentz-violating operators up to mass dimension 10, and we discuss constraints from threshold effects in meson decays and Cerenkov emission.