Enhanced tau neutrino appearance through invisible decay

The decay of neutrino mass eigenstates leads to a change of the conversion and survival probability of neutrino flavor eigenstates. Remarkably, we find that the neutrino decay provides an enhancement of the expected tau appearance signal with respect to the standard oscillation scenario for the long-baseline OPERA experiment. The increase of the $ν_μ\rightarrow ν_τ$ conversion probability by the decay of one of the mass eigenstates is due to a reduction of the "destructive interference" among the different massive neutrino components. Motivated by the recently released results of the OPERA Collaboration showing a number of observed $ν_τ$ events larger than expected, we perform a statistical analysis including the invisible decay hypothesis. We obtain a very mild preference for invisible decays, with a best fit value $τ_3/m_3 \simeq 2.6\times 10^{-13}$ s/eV, and a constraint at the 90$\%$ confidence level for the neutrino decay lifetime to be $τ_3/m_3 \gtrsim 1.3\times 10^{-13}$ s/eV.

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