The Ghost of Pauli: Implications of Energy Conservation in Neutrino Oscillations
D. V. Ahluwalia
(University of Canterbury, NZ)
Coauthor(s): D. Schritt
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Insistence on the conservation of energy led Pauli to conjecture the existence of neutrinos. The data that has since accumulated adds a new twist to the story. Neutrinos neither carry a definite mass, nor a definite energy, and as a consequence oscillate from one flavour to another. Each flavour has a different energy expectation value. Neutrino oscillations thus raise a fundamental question, how is energy conserved when a neutrino of one flavour oscillates to another flavour? To resolve this paradoxical situation, we here propose a conjecture that the neutrino mixing matrix must be such that in the oscillation process the energy expectation values enjoy flavour independence. This conjecture turns out to be very powerful. Using the existing data, it suggests that either neutrinos have interactions that go beyond those expected from the standard model, or there must exist sterile neutrinos.