A combined treatment of neutrino decay and neutrino oscillations

Neutrino decay in vacuum has often been considered as an alternative to neutrino oscillations. Because nonzero neutrino masses imply the possibility of both neutrino decay and neutrino oscillations, we present a model-independent formal treatment of these combined scenarios. For that, we show for the example of Majoron decay that in many cases decay products are observable and may even oscillate. Furthermore, we construct a minimal scenario in which we study the physical implications of neutrino oscillations with intermediate decays. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.