Unbroken versus broken mirror world: a tale of two vacua

If the Lagrangian of nature respects parity invariance then there are two distinct possibilities: either parity is unbroken by the vacuum or it is spontaneously broken. We examine the two simplest phenomenologically consistent gauge models which have unbroken and spontaneously broken parity symmetries, respectively. These two models have a Lagrangian of the same form, but a different parameter range is chosen in the Higgs potential. They both predict the existence of dark matter and can explain the MACHO events. However, the models predict quite different neutrino physics. Although both have light mirror (effectively sterile) neutrinos, the ordinary-mirror neutrino mixing angles are unobservably tiny in the broken parity case. The minimal broken parity model therefore cannot simultaneously explain the solar, atmospheric and LSND data. By contrast, the unbroken parity version can explain all of the neutrino anomalies. Furthermore, we argue that the unbroken case provides the most natural explanation of the neutrino physics anomalies (irrespective of whether evidence from the LSND experiment is included) because of its characteristic maximal mixing prediction.