Neutrino oscillations in gravitational and cosmological backgrounds

Abstract

We use the eikonal approximation in order to calculate the additional phase shift between two neutrino mass eigenstates during their propagation in a background of gravitational wave or scalar perturbations in the flat and the FRW spacetime metric. We comment on the dependence of the results on the characteristics of the perturbations, give some order-of-magnitude estimates, and find that, although small, the resulting phase difference persists for large redshifts, up to the validity of our approximations.

Comments: 15 pages, 1 figure, accepted in Gen. Rel. Grav