Decays of supernova neutrinos Original Research Article

Supernova neutrinos could be well-suited for probing neutrino decay, since decay may be observed even for very small decay rates or coupling constants. We will introduce an effective operator framework for the combined description of neutrino decay and neutrino oscillations for supernova neutrinos, which can especially take into account two properties: one is the radially symmetric neutrino flux, allowing a decay product to be re-directed towards the observer even if the parent neutrino had a different original direction of propagation. The other is decoherence because of the long baselines for coherently produced neutrinos. We will demonstrate how to use this effective theory to calculate the time-dependent fluxes at the detector. In addition, we will show the implications of a Majoron-like decay model. As a result, we will demonstrate that for certain parameter values one may observe some effects which could also mimic signals similar to the ones expected from supernova models, making it in general harder to separate neutrino and supernova properties.