Prospect of determining the Dirac/Majorana state of the neutrino by a multi-OWL experiment

Abstract

We consider the non-radiative two-body decay of a neutrino to a daughter neutrino with degraded energy and a very light particle (Majoron). Ultrahigh-energy neutrinos from an astrophysical source like a gamma ray burst undergoing this decay process are found to produce different number of events in the detector depending on whether they are Majorana or Dirac particles. The next generation large-scale experiments like Multi-OWL is expected to provide us an accurate determination of the flux of neutrinos from astrophysical sources and this may enable us to distinguish between the Dirac and Majorana nature of neutrino.