Angular momentum non-conserving decays in isotropic media

Abstract

Various processes that are forbidden in the vacuum due to angular momentum conservation can occur in a medium that is isotropic and does not carry any angular momentum. We illustrate this by considering explicitly two examples. The first one is the decay of a spin-0 particle into a photon and another spin-0 particle, using a model involving the Yukawa interactions of the scalar particles with a charged fermion field. The second one involves the decay of a neutrino into another neutrino and a graviton, in the standard model of particle interactions augmented with the linearized gravitational couplings.

Comments: 22 pages, Latex, uses axodraw.sty. 3 figures embedded in the tex file. This paper contains the same material as that presented in two earlier papers, arXiv:0901.2981 and arXiv:0901.2982, written by us. This version supersedes those two papers