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arXiv:2009.10165 · Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

Neutrino flavor oscillations without flavor states

Bruno de S. L. Torres, Tales Rick Perche, André G. S. Landulfo, George E. A. Matsas

Published Nov 18, 2020• 36 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevd.102.093003

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Abstract We revisit the theory of neutrino oscillations and describe it through the formalism of weak measurements with postselection. It is well understood that due to the large momentum uncertainty in detection, there is no collapse of the neutrino wavefunction in the momentum or energy basis, and the mass eigenstates are detected coherently. Here we show that postselection, which projects the system to a final flavor state, deforms the system wavefunction in such a way that the momentum detected is not the expectation value of the neutrino mass eigenstates momenta, but the corresponding weak value. We use the weak values to describe the intermediate state in the oscillation process, avoiding problems in defining probability currents for particle states with mass superposition.
We study the oscillations of neutrinos in a model in which the neutrino is coupled to a localized, idealized source and detector. By varying the spatial and temporal resolution of the source and detector we are able to model the full range of source and detector types ranging from coherent to incoherent. We find that this approach is useful in understanding the interface between the quantum mechanical nature of neutrino oscillations on the one hand and the production and detection systems on the other hand. This method can easily be extended to study the oscillations of other particles such as the neutral KKK and BBB mesons. We find that this approach gives a reliable way to treat the various ambiguities which arise when one examines the oscillations from a wave packet point of view. We demonstrate that the conventional oscillation formula is correct in the relativistic limit and that several recent claims of an extra factor of 2 in the oscillation length are incorrect. We also demonstrate explicitly that the oscillations of neutrinos which have separated spatially may be ``revived'' by a long coherent measurement.
The wave packet approach to neutrino oscillations provides an enlightening description of quantum decoherence induced, during propagation, by localization effects. Within this approach, we show that a deeper insight into the dynamical aspects of particle mixing can be obtained if one investigates the behavior of quantum correlations associated to flavor oscillations. By identifying the neutrino three-flavor modes with (suitably defined) three-qubit modes, the exploitation of tools of quantum information theory for mixed states allows a detailed analysis of the dynamical behavior of flavor entanglement during free propagation. This provides further elements leading to a more complete understanding of the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations, and a basis for possible applicative implementations. The analysis is carried out by studying the distribution of the flavor entanglement; to this aim, we perform combined investigations of the behaviors of the two-flavor concurrence and of the logarithmic negativities associated with specific bipartitions of the three flavors.
Quantum decoherence in neutrino oscillations was theorized almost 50 years ago, however there is still no clear theoretical understanding of this phenomenon, not even agreement on whether or not it could be observed at all. Treating all particles, including the source and detector, consistently in QFT, we are working on a model where the decoherence emerges from the time evolution of the initial state. We started by studying some simplified cases, obtaining nonetheless interesting results: we have shown that environmental interactions play crucial role in the emergence of decoherence, and if the neutrino creation happens in vacuum there is no maximal coherence length. We have also shown that some of the assumptions commonly used in literature (such as the covariance of the wavepackets) are inconsistent, since the time evolution would break the Lorentz invariance; moreover we have seen that, contrary to the usual intuition, the uncertainty on the detector momentum does not always play a relevant role in decoherence, at least as long as the detector particle is non-relativistic, since its contribution is suppressed by a factor proportional to p/M. Finally, we also notice the emergence of a new quantum effect: when the first neutrinos arrive, the oscillations do not starts immediately but only a very short amount of time; however, since the time window when this effect would be observable is extremely small, the precision required to measure such an effect is most likely well beyond the current technical capabilities
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.