Neutrino flavor oscillations in stochastic gravitational waves

Abstract

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. In both cases of two and three neutrino flavors, we predict the ratios of fluxes of different flavors at a detector for cosmic neutrinos with relatively low energies owing to the interaction with such a GW background. The obtained results are compared with the recent observation of the flavor content of the astrophysical neutrino fluxes.