Interaction of Neutrinos with a Cosmological K-essence Scalar

Understand

In this paper we study a novel means of coupling neutrinos to a Lorentz violating background k-essence field.

• We first look into the effect that k-essence has on the neutrino dispersion relation and derive a general formula for the neutrino velocity in the presence on a k-essence background.
• The influence of k-essence coupling on neutrino oscillations is then considered.
• It is found that a non-diagonal k-essence coupling leads to an oscillation length that goes like \lambda \sim E^{-1} where E is the energy.