Dispersion of neutrinos in a medium

Abstract

We analyze the dispersion relations of Weyl or Majorana, and Dirac neutrinos in a complex scalar medium which interacts with the neutrinos through Yukawa couplings. They are solved by perturbative calculation in various limits representing different physical situations, some of which allow the medium-induced neutrino oscillation to occur. Remarkably, peculiar dispersion relations arise differently for Majorana or Dirac neutrinos in the non-relativistic limit. This provides an unpleasant restriction on the cosmological scenario of a scalar dark matter coupling to neutrinos. At present, the model parameter space is constrained by the neutrino scattering with dark matter through astrophysical neutrino observations.

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures