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arXiv:2005.07758

Neutrino oscillations as many-particle induced interference between distinguishable particles

Alejandro Cabo Montes de, Nana Cabo Bizet

Published May 15, 2020• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the causes of the curious property of neutrino oscillations of looking as an interference between fully distinguishable particles. The sources of this effect are identified as to be determined by the many particle nature of space of states of the quantum field theory. It is firstly underlined that in order to explain the observed oscillations, the neutrino subspace of states should not be interpreted as the direct product of the three neutrinos Fock spaces, which is equivalent to imposing a superselection rule. Further, it is argued that the linear completion of such a direct product space of states permits to describe the measured oscillations. Thus, the space of states of te Standard Model (SM) should be interpreted as the linear completion of the direct product of all the Fock spaces (boson or fermions ones) associated to the distinguishable particles. Then, it follows that the neutrino oscillations are determined as interference between independent particles, which are generated by states being outside the direct product of the neutrino Fock spaces. This interpretation seems to imply a large amount of interference observations between distinguishable particles in Particle as well as in Condensed Matter Physics. For seeking clearness, the discussion is done in the framework of a simple Quantum Field Theory (QFT) model of two relativistic free massive neutrinos.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2005.07758

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We study how vacuum neutrino oscillations can be affected by a causal, nonlinear and state-dependent modification of quantum field theory that may be interpreted using the many-worlds formulation of quantum mechanics. The effect is induced by a Higgs-neutrino Yukawa interaction that causes a nonlinear interference between the neutrino mass eigenstates. This leads to a tiny change in the oscillation pattern of light, active neutrinos. At large baselines where the oscillations disappear, the nonlinear effect is also suppressed and does not source correlations between the mass eigenstates once they are entangled with the environment. Our example provides a way to compute effects of nonlinear quantum mechanics and field theory that may probe the possible physical reality of many worlds.
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We analyze the problem of neutrino oscillations via a fermionic particle detector model inspired by the physics of the Fermi theory of weak interactions. The model naturally leads to a description of emission and absorption of neutrinos in terms of localized two-level systems. By explicitly including source and detector as part of the dynamics, the formalism is shown to recover the standard results for neutrino oscillations without mention to ``flavor states,'' which are ill defined in quantum field theory. This illustrates how particle detector models provide a powerful theoretical tool to approach the measurement issue in quantum field theory and emphasizes that the notion of flavor states, although sometimes useful, must not play any crucial role in neutrino phenomenology.
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Abstract It is well known that neutrino oscillations may damp due to decoherence caused by the separation of mass eigenstate wave packets or by a baseline uncertainty of order the oscillation wave length. In this note we show that if the particles created together with the neutrino are not measured and do not interact with the environment, then the first source of decoherence is not present. This demonstration uses the saddle point approximation and also assumes that the experiment lasts longer than a certain threshold. We independently derive this result using the external wave packet model and also using a model in which the fields responsible for neutrino production and detection are treated dynamically. Intuitively this result is a consequence of the fact that the neutrino emission time does not affect the final state and so amplitudes corresponding to distinct emission times must be added coherently. This fact also implies that oscillations resulting from mass eigenstates which are detected simultaneously arise from neutrinos which were not created simultaneously but are nonetheless coherent, realizing the neutrino oscillation paradigm of Kobach, Manohar and McGreevy.
It has been claimed that wave packets must be covariant and also that decohered neutrino oscillations are always revived during measurement. These conjectures are supported by general arguments which are not specific to the electroweak theory, and so if they are true for neutrinos they will also be true for simplified models. In this paper we produce such a simplified model in which the neutrino wave function, including its entanglement with the source particle and the environment, can be calculated explicitly in quantum field theory. It exhibits neutrino oscillation, which is reduced at late times by decoherence due to interactions of the source with the environment. One simple lesson from this model is that only the difference between the environmental interactions before and after neutrino emission can reduce the amplitude of neutrino oscillations. The model will be used to test the conjectures in a companion paper.