Analytic treatment of 3-flavor neutrino oscillation and decay in matter

Abstract

We present compact analytic expressions for 3-flavor neutrino oscillation probabilities with invisible neutrino decay, where matter effects have been explicitly included. We take into account the possibility that the oscillation and decay components of the effective Hamiltonian do not commute. This is achieved by employing the techniques of inverse Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff (BCH) expansion and the Cayley-Hamilton theorem applied in the 3-flavor framework. If only the vacuum mass eigenstate $\nu_3$ decays, we show that the treatment of neutrino propagation may be reduced to an effective 2-flavor analysis in the One Mass Scale Dominance (OMSD) approximation. The oscillation probabilities for $P_{\mu\mu}$, $P_{ee}$, $P_{e\mu}$ and $P_{\mu e}$ -- relevant for reactor, long baseline and atmospheric neutrino experiments -- are obtained as perturbative expansions for the case of only $\nu_3$ decay, as well as for the more general scenario where all components of the decay matrix are non-zero. The analytic results thus obtained match the exact numerical results for constant density matter to a high precision and provide physical insights into possible effects of the decay of neutrinos as they propagate through Earth matter. We find that the effects of neutrino decay are most likely to be observable in $P_{\mu\mu}$. We also point out that at any long baseline, the oscillation dips in $P_{\mu\mu}$ can show higher survival probabilities in the case with decay than without decay, and explain this feature using our analytic approximations.