Symmetries of neutrino oscillations in vacuum, matter, and approximation schemes

Peter B. Denton, Stephen J. Parke

Published 2021-06-23Version 1

Expressions for neutrino oscillations contain a high degree of symmetry, but typical forms for the oscillation probabilities mask these symmetries. We elucidate the $2^7=128$ symmetries of the vacuum parameters and draw connections to the choice of definitions of the parameters as well as interesting degeneracies. We also show that in the presence of matter an additional set of $2^7=128$ symmetries exist of the matter parameters for a total of $2^{14}=16,384$ symmetries of the vacuum and/or matter parameters in the oscillation probabilities in matter. Due to the complexity of the exact expressions for neutrino oscillations in matter, we show that under certain assumptions, approximate expressions have at most $2^6=64$ additional symmetries of the matter parameters for a total of $2^{13}=8,192$ symmetries. We investigate which of these symmetries apply to numerous approximate expressions in the literature and show that a more careful consideration of symmetries improves the precision of approximations.