Atmospheric Neutrinos as a Probe of CPT Violation

Abstract

We show that atmospheric neutrinos can provide a sensitive and robust probe of CPT violation (CPTV). We perform realistic event-rate calculations and study the variations of the ratio of total muon to antimuon survival rates with $L/E$ and $L$ ($L$ $\equiv$ baseline length, $E$ $\equiv$ neutrino energy) in a detector capable of identifying the muon charge. We demonstrate that measurements of these ratios when coupled with the significant $L$ and $E$ range which characterizes the atmospheric neutrino spectrum provides a method of both detecting the presence of such violations and putting bounds on them which compare very favourably with those possible from a future neutrino factory.