A combined treatment of neutrino decay and neutrino oscillations

Abstract

Neutrino decay in vacuum has often been considered as an alternative to neutrino oscillations. Because non-zero neutrino masses imply the possibility of both neutrino decay and neutrino oscillations, we present a model-independent formal treatment of these combined scenarios. For that, we show for the example of Majoron decay that in many cases decay products are observable and may even oscillate. Furthermore, we construct a minimal scenario where we study the physical implications of neutrino oscillations with intermediate decays.