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Physics Letters B

Inertial effects on neutrino oscillations and decoherence: A wave packet approach

Giuseppe Gaetano Luciano

Published Nov 4, 2021• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study the impact of inertial effects on neutrino oscillations and decoherence. Toward this end, we describe the propagation of neutrino wave packets by employing the density matrix formalism. We show that the acceleration and angular velocity of the observer's reference frame significantly influence neutrino coherence, the effects being in principle testable in strong regime.

DOI
10.1016/j.physletb.2021.136772

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There is renewed attention to whether we can observe the decoherence effect in neutrino oscillation due to the separation of wave packets with different masses in near-future experiments. As a contribution to this endeavor, we extend the existing formulation based on a single 1D Gaussian wave function to an amplitude between two distinct 3D Gaussian wave packets, corresponding to the neutrinos being produced and detected, with different central momenta and spacetime positions and with different widths. We find that the spatial widths-squared for the production and detection appear additively in the (de)coherence length and in the localization factor for governing the propagation of the wave packet, whereas they appear as the reduced one (inverse of the sum of inverse) in the momentum conservation factor. The overall probability is governed by the ratio of the reduced to the sum.
We analyze the effects of gravity on neutrino wave packet decoherence. As a specific example, we consider the gravitational field of a spinning spherical body described by the Lense–Thirring metric. By working in the weak-field limit and employing Gaussian wave packets, we show that the characteristic coherence length of neutrino oscillation processes is nontrivially affected, with the corrections being dependent on the mass and angular velocity of the gravity source. Possible experimental implications are finally discussed.
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Majorana neutrino oscillations in a magnetic field are considered using the wave packets formalism. The modified Dirac equation for Majorana neutrinos with non-zero transition magnetic moments propagating in a magnetic field is solved analytically in the two flavour case. The expressions for the oscillations probabilities are derived accounting for the decoherence effect emerging at distances exceeding the coherence length. It is shown that for Majorana neutrinos propagating in a magnetic field the coherence length coincides with the coherence length for neutrino oscillations in vacuum when the vacuum frequency is much greater than the magnetic frequency (ωvac≫ωBω_{vac} \gg ω_Bωvac​≫ωB​), while it is proportional to the cube of the average neutrino momentum if (ωvac≪ωBω_{vac} \ll ω_Bωvac​≪ωB​). We show that the decoherence effect may appear during neutrino propagation in a magnetic field of supernova.
When neutrinos propagate over long distances, the mass eigenstate components of a flavor eigenstate will become spatially separated due to their different group velocities. This can happen over terrestrial distance scales if the neutrino energy is of order MeV and if the neutrino is localized (in a quantum mechanical sense) to subatomic scales. For example, if the Heisenberg uncertainty in the neutrino position is below 0.01 Angstrom, neutrino decoherence can be observed in reactor neutrinos using a large liquid scintillator detector.
We theoretically explore the possibility of observing the quantum decoherence of neutrino oscillation due to the vacuum dispersion, that the wave-packet of neutrino spatially splits according to the different velocities of two mass eigenstates. We find that if this decoherence could be observed and the range of values of the mixing angle is known, then the superluminal neutrino phenomena could occur for some mixing angles as the consequence of a weak measurement about flavor mixing in the neutrino propagation. Our calculation gives the explicit dependence of group velocity shift to the decoherence factor and the weak value of neutrino's pre and post-selected states. We also study the related problems for the neutrino oscillation with three generations.