Implications on neutrino oscillation plus decay from recent solar neutrino data

Abstract

Recently the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) has measured both the rates as well as the day-night asymmetries in the flux of neutrinos from the Sun in the charged-current (CC), neutral-current (NC) and elastic scattering (ES) channels. Motivated by the small but negative day-night asymmetry in the NC channel at SNO (1.2 standard deviations away from zero), we consider whether such a non-zero asymmetry can be generated in a framework where active neutrinos can both oscillate and decay, since the NC day-night asymmetry is zero in a frame-work that includes pure oscillations of active flavours. We find that the neutral current day-night asymmetry is strictly zero when we include both oscillations and decay. The result holds for arbitrary number of active neutrino species, with some reasonable assumptions on the decay parameters. Hence, a non-zero asymmetry in the neutral current sector, if it survives, can only come from oscillations/decay into sterile flavours. We also examine the allowed region of parameter space coming from a combined analysis of the total event rates in the charged-current, neutral current and elastic scattering sectors in a two-flavour framework, and find that the neutral current rates are most sensitive to (and hence restrict considerably) the allowed values of the decay parameter involving the life-time of the heavier mass eigenstate to $τ_{2_0} > 10^{-4}$ s for eV mass neutrinos.