Neutrino Decay and Atmospheric Neutrinos

Abstract

We reconsider neutrino decay as an explanation for atmospheric neutrino observations. We show that if the mass-difference relevant to the two mixed states ν_μand ν_τis very small (< 10^{-4} eV^2), then a very good fit to the observations can be obtained with decay of a component of ν_μto a sterile neutrino and a Majoron. We discuss how the K2K and MINOS long-baseline experiments can distinguish the decay and oscillation scenarios.

9 pages, Revtex, uses epsf.sty, 3 postscript figures. Additions and corrections to references, minor changes in the text and to some numbers