Probing CPT violation with atmospheric neutrinos

We investigate the recently suggested scheme of independent mass matrices for neutrinos and antineutrinos. Such a CPT violating scheme is able to account for all neutrino data with the three known flavors. For atmospheric neutrinos this means that it is possible to have different mass squared differences driving the oscillation for neutrinos and antineutrinos. We analyze the atmospheric and K2K data within the simplest scheme of two neutrino oscillation, neglecting electron neutrino oscillation. We find that the preferred region is close to the CPT conserving mass spectra. However the spectra with the antineutrino mass squared difference about or larger than 0.1 eV(2) and the neutrino mass squared difference about 2 x 10(-3) eV(2) is not significantly disfavored. In this parameter region the atmospheric data are independent of the antineutrino mass squared difference. Therefore only rather weak bounds can be put on CPT violation effects contributing to different masses for the neutrinos and antineutrinos. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.