Neutrino oscillations and a new Faraday effect

By analogy with the classical Faraday effect for the electromagnetic waves, a Faraday effect for massive neutrinos is found to be a somewhat generic description of neutrino oscillations when the neutrinos traverse a dense medium with or without a magnetic field. We further plot the Faraday angle for the solar neutrino problem as an illustration of the fact that the Faraday effect may yield a conceptually convenient parametrization of various neutrino oscillation scenarios. (author). 8 refs, 3 figs