Neutrino flavor oscillations in stochastic gravitational waves

Understand

We study neutrino flavor oscillations in a plane gravitational wave (GW) with circular polarization.

• For this purpose we use the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation to get the contribution of GW to the effective Hamiltonian for the neutrino mass eigenstates.
• Then, considering stochastic GWs, we derive the equation for the density matrix for flavor neutrinos and analytically solve it in the two flavors approximation.
• The equation for the density matrix for the three neutrino flavors is also derived and solved numerically.