Probing Superluminal Neutrinos Via Refraction

Abstract

One phenomenological explanation of superluminal propagation of neutrinos, which may have been observed by OPERA and MINOS, is that neutrinos travel faster inside of matter than in vacuum. If so neutrinos exhibit refraction inside matter and should exhibit other manifestations of refraction, such as deflection and reflection. Such refraction would be easily detectable through the momentum imparted to appropriately shaped refractive material inserted into the neutrino beam. For NuMI this could be as large as ~10g cm/s. If these effect were found, they would provide new ways of manipulating and detecting neutrinos. Reasons why this scenario seems implausible are given, however it is still worthwhile to conduct simple searches for differential refraction of neutrinos.