Constraints on Neutrino Lifetime from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory

Understand

The long baseline between the Earth and the Sun makes solar neutrinos an excellent test beam for exploring possible neutrino decay.

• The signature of such decay would be an energy-dependent distortion of the traditional survival probability which can be fit for using well-developed and high precision analysis methods.
• Here a model including neutrino decay is fit to all three phases of $^8$B solar neutrino data taken by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.
• This fit constrains the lifetime of neutrino mass state $\nu_2$ to be ${>8.08\times10^{-5}}$ s/eV at $90\%$ confidence.