Leptonic commutators and clean T violation in neutrino oscillations

Abstract

A realistic medium- or long-baseline neutrino experiment may suffer from terrestrial matter effects which are likely to contaminate the genuine T-violating asymmetry between \nu_\alpha \to \nu_\beta and \nu_\beta \to \nu_\alpha oscillations. With the help of the commutators of lepton mass matrices in matter, we show that this kind of contamination is negligible for a variety of experiments provided the neutrino beam energy E and the baseline length L satisfy the condition 10^{-7} (L/km)^2 (GeV/E) << 1. The same observation is true for the CP-violating term of the asymmetry between \nu_\alpha \to \nu_\beta and \bar{\nu}_\alpha \to \bar{\nu}_\beta oscillations in matter.

Comments: LaTeX 7 pages. More discussions added. Accepted for publication in PRD