The long baseline between Earth and the Sun makes solar neutrinos an excellent test beam for exploring possible neutrino decay. The signature of such decay would be an energy-dependent distortion of the traditional survival probability which can be fit for using well-developed and high-precision analysis methods. Here a model including neutrino decay is fit to all three phases of ${}^8\mathrm{B}$ solar neutrino data taken by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). This fit constrains the lifetime of neutrino mass state ${\nu }_2$ to be $>8.08\times {10}^{-5}\mathrm{s}/\mathrm{eV}$ at 90% confidence. An analysis combining this SNO result with those from other solar neutrino experiments results in a combined limit for the lifetime of mass state ${\nu }_2$ of $>1.92\times {10}^{-3}\mathrm{s}/\mathrm{eV}$ at 90% confidence.

• Received 3 December 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.032013

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Published by the American Physical Society