Neutrino magnetic moments, flavor mixing, and the SuperKamiokande solar data

Abstract

We find that magnetic neutrino-electron scattering is unaffected by oscillations for vacuum mixing of Dirac neutrinos with only diagonal moments and for Majorana neutrinos with two flavors. For MSW mixing, these cases again obtain, though the effective moments can depend on the neutrino energy. Thus, e.g., the magnetic moments measured with ${\bar{\nu }}_e$ from a reactor and ${\nu }_e$ from the Sun could be different. With minimal assumptions, we find a new limit on ${\mu }_{\nu }$ using the 825-days SuperKamiokande solar neutrino data: $|{\mu }_{\nu }|\le 1.5\times 10^{-10}{\mu }_B$ at 90% CL, comparable to the existing reactor limit.

Comments: 4 pages including two inline figures. New version has 825 days SK result, some minor revisions. Accepted for Physical Review Letters