Probing nonstandard lepton number violating interactions in neutrino oscillations

Understand

We discuss lepton number violating processes in the context of long-baseline neutrino oscillations.

• We summarise and compare neutrino flavour oscillations in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, both for standard oscillations and for those that violate lepton number.
• When the active neutrinos are Majorana in nature, the required helicity reversal gives a strong suppression by the neutrino mass over the energy, $(m_{\nu}/E_{\nu})^{2}$.
• Instead, the presence of non-standard lepton number violating interactions incorporating right-handed lepton currents at production or detection alleviate the mass suppression while also factorising the oscillation probability from the total rate.