Neutrino spin oscillations in gravitational fields

Abstract

We study neutrino spin oscillations in black hole backgrounds. In the case of a charged black hole, the maximum frequency of oscillations is a monotonically increasing function of the charge. For a rotating black hole, the maximum frequency decreases with increasing the angular momentum. In both cases, the frequency of spin oscillations decreases as the distance from the black hole grows. As a phenomenological application of our results, we study simple bipolar neutrino system which is an interesting example of collective neutrino oscillations. We show that the precession frequency of the flavor pendulum as a function of the neutrino number density will be higher for a charged/non-rotating black hole compared with a neutral/rotating black hole respectively.