2006/07/11 by Keith R. Dienes, Sabine Hossenfelder · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Brane #Fermion #Measurements of neutrino speed #Mixing (physics) #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino oscillation #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Solar neutrino #Sterile neutrino #Theoretical physics #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.74.065013
published as Phys.Rev. D74 (2006) 065013 · 11 pages, LaTeX, 1 figure
arxiv created 2006/07/11 · openalex publication_date 2006/09/18 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Higher-dimensional models of neutrino physics with one or more right-handed neutrinos in the bulk have attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, a critical issue for such models is to find a way of introducing the required flavor dependence needed for generating neutrino oscillations. In this paper, we point out that a natural minimal framework that accomplishes this can be constructed by combining the bulk-neutrino hypothesis for right-handed neutrinos with the split-fermion scenario for left-handed neutrinos. This combination leads to a unique flavor signature for neutrino phenomenology which easily incorporates large flavor mixing angles. This hybrid scenario also has a number of additional important features. For example, one previous difficulty of the split-fermion scenario applied to neutrinos has been that the mass matrix is exponentially sensitive to neutrino displacements within the brane. However, in our hybrid scenario, the interactions between the brane and bulk naturally convert this dependence from exponential to linear. Another important feature is that our hybrid scenario provides its own natural regulator for Kaluza-Klein sums. Thus, in our scenario, all Kaluza-Klein summations are manifestly finite, even in cases with multiple extra dimensions. But most importantly, our mechanism completely decouples the effective neutrino flavor mixing angles from the sizes of the overlaps between the neutrino wave functions within the brane. Thus, we are able to obtain large neutrino mixing angles even when these neutrinos have significant spatial separations and their overlaps vanish.