Neutrino oscillations in exotic geometries and the equivalence principle violation
The authors consider the propagation of neutrinos in a gravitational field generated by a ``benign'' wormhole. By Morris and Thorne (1988) this field was shown to be a solution of the Einstein equations with a matter source having a negative energy density. This wormhole is insofar benign as its throat can be traversed arbitrarily quickly and the exotic matter can be confined to regions of arbitrarily small thickness. Assuming a violation of the equivalence principle by different couplings of neutrino flavor eigenstates to gravity, it is proven that neutrino oscillations caused by this gravitational field can occur. The analysis is performed for massive and massless neutrinos, where for each coupling the same constant throughout the universe is presupposed. After introducing a measure \(\Delta f\) for the flavor dependence of the gravitational coupling, by using the constraints of the mass of wormholes given by stellar-substellar masses constraints on \(\Delta f\) and thus on the violation of the equivalence principle are determined.
scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1788517