Neutrino Spin and Flavor Oscillations in Gravitational Fields

Abstract

We study spin and flavor oscillations of astrophysical neutrinos under the influence of external fields in curved spacetime. First, we consider spin oscillations in case of neutrinos gravitationally scattered off a rotating supermassive black hole surrounded by a thin magnetized accretion disk. We find that the gravitational interaction only does not result in the spin-flip of scattered ultrarelativistic neutrinos. Realistic magnetic fields lead to the significant reduction of the observed flux of neutrinos possessing reasonable magnetic moments. Second, we study neutrino flavor oscillations in stochastic gravitational waves (GWs). We derive the effective Hamiltonian for neutrinos interacting with a plane GW having an arbitrary polarization. Then, we consider stochastic GWs with arbitrary correlators of amplitudes. The equation for the density matrix for neutrino oscillations is solved analytically and the probabilities to detect certain neutrino flavors are derived. We find that the interaction of neutrinos, emitted by a core-collapsing supernova, with the stochastic GW background results in the several percent change of the neutrino fluxes. The observability of the predicted effects is discussed.