Abstract Although neutrino–antineutrino states originating from neutral-current interactions are blind concerning the flavor state, an oscillation pattern is predicted provided that both neutrino and antineutrino are detected. This issue arises from both the coherence and entanglement of the neutrino–antineutrino states. Based on quantum resource theory, we use the
l1 l 1 -norm and concurrence to quantify quantum coherence and entanglement, respectively. Considering the localization properties by the wave packet approach and a matter potential which appears when neutrino and antineutrino propagate in a material medium, we obtain the
l1 l 1 -norm and concurrence. We see that the neutrino and antineutrino remain entangled for larger baseline lengths when they propagate in a material medium. In the case of the coherence property, the
l1 l 1 -norm decreases in comparison to the corresponding one in vacuum. However, its damping occurs for larger distances.
If a neutrino or antineutrino produced in the decay of an unstable particle is not entangled to its accompanying particles, its mass is necessarily correlated with its momentum. In this manuscript, I illustrate that this entanglement would destroy the quantum coherence between the neutrino’s mass eigenstates in both the momentum and position representations, which was overlooked by other authors in previous investigations of entanglement and coherence associated with neutrino oscillations. I further point out that the states of a neutrino and an electron become nonseparable after their charged-current interaction. This nonseparability leads to decoherence for neutrinos propagating in matter, but was not taken into consideration in previous investigations of the matter effect.