1997/04/30 by Ken Kiers, Nathan Weiss · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.56.5776
published as Phys.Rev. D56 (1997) 5776-5785 · 28 pages, 6 figures, Latex; minor changes, one reference added; version to appear in Phys. Rev. D
arxiv created 1997/08/07 · openalex publication_date 1997/11/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Motivated by the effect of matter on neutrino oscillations (the MSW effect) we study in more detail the propagation of neutrinos in a dense medium. The dispersion relation for massive neutrinos in a medium is known to have a minimum at nonzero momentum p\ensuremath∼GF\ensuremathρ/√(2). We study in detail the origin and consequences of this dispersion relation for both Dirac and Majorana neutrinos both in a toy model with only neutral currents and a single neutrino flavor and in a realistic ``standard model'' with two neutrino flavors. We find that for a range of neutrino momenta near the minimum of the dispersion relation, Dirac neutrinos are trapped by their coherent interactions with the medium. This effect does not lead to the trapping of Majorana neutrinos.