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Dirac-Majorana neutrinos distinction in four-body decays

Juan Manuel Márquez, Diego Portillo-Sánchez , and Pablo Roig

Departamento de Física, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios, Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Apartado Postal 14-740, 07360 Ciudad de México, México

Phys. Rev. D 109, 033005 – Published 8 February, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.033005

Abstract

A novel method to differentiate the effects of Dirac and Majorana (D-M) neutrinos in four-body decays has been discussed in [C. S. Kim et al., Inferring the nature of active neutrinos: Dirac or Majorana?, Phys. Rev. D 105, 113006 (2022).]. There, it is concluded that the back-to-back kinematic scenario seems to avoid the constraint imposed by the “practical Dirac-Majorana confusion theorem,” as one does not need to fully integrate over neutrino and antineutrino momenta. In this paper, we propose to analyze radiative leptonic lepton-decays ( $ℓ \to ℓ^{'} ν \bar{ν} γ$ ), as an independent alternative process to study the possible Majorana nature of neutrinos. Our approach demonstrates that, in the back-to-back kinematic configuration (for the $ℓ^{'} - γ$ and $ν - \bar{ν}$ systems, respectively), the distinction between Dirac and Majorana cases disappears when the inaccessible neutrino angle is integrated out, which might appear unexpected considering the claims in [C. S. Kim et al., Inferring the nature of active neutrinos: Dirac or Majorana?, Phys. Rev. D 105, 113006 (2022).]. Our results apply in absence of nonstandard interactions, which can enhance generally the sensitivity to the neutrino nature.

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Phys. Rev. D 109, 033005– Published 8 February, 2024

Vol. 109, Iss. 3 — 1 February 2024

Received 7 December 2023
Accepted 17 January 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.033005

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

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Dirac-Majorana neutrinos distinction in four-body decays

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