UC San Diego

We explore the implications of imposing the constraint that two neutrino flavors (which for definiteness we take to be ν(μ) and ν(τ)) are similarly coupled to the mass basis in addition to the unitarity constraints. We allow three active and an arbitrary number of sterile neutrinos. We show that in this scheme one of the mass eigenstates decouples from the problem, reducing the dimension of the flavor space by one. This result allows significant simplification in the treatment of matter-enhanced neutrino transformation where multiple flavors and level crossings are involved. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.