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Springer proceedings in physics

Neutrino Oscillations and Quantum Decoherence

Konstantin Stankevich, Alexander I. Studenikin, Maxim Vialkov

Published Oct 10, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract We study the neutrino evolution accounting for the decays of the heavier neutrino state into a lighter one with emission of the massless particle. We show, that there is no interference effect in neutrino quantum decoherence when considering two possible independent channels of neutrino decay.
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-88933-2_34

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Abstract We developed the previously proposed theoretical framework based on the quantum field theory of open systems applied to neutrinos. Within this framework we have considered the neutrino evolution and neutrino flavour oscillations taking into account for the decay of a heavier neutrino state to a lighter neutrino state and to a massless particle, namely photons, dark photons, axion-like particles and gravitons. We have shown that the neutrino evolution accounting for the decays will be governed by the Lindblad master equation, in which the decoherence parameters are proportional to the neutrino decay rate.
Abstract Recently, several studies of neutrino oscillations in the vacuum have not found the decoherence long expected from the separation of wave packets of neutrinos in different mass eigenstates. We show that such decoherence will, on the other hand, be present in a treatment including any mechanism which leads to a dependence of the final state on both the neutrino’s emission and absorption time. Using a simplified model in 1+11+11+1 1 + 1 d, we show that if the positions of the final state particles are measured, or equivalently entangled with the environment, then decoherence will damp neutrino oscillations. We also show that wave packet spreading can cause the decoherence to eventually saturate, without completely suppressing the oscillations. These results are not an artifact of the approximation used: we show that, considering the V−AV-AV−A V - A model in 3+13+13+1 3 + 1 d, the difference would be simply a total multiplicative factor that would not affect the oscillation probability nor the decoherence.
I will present some of the results obtained regarding the emergence of decoherence in neutrino oscillations. In our model all the particles, including the source and detector, are treated dynamically and evolved consistently with Quantum Field Theory; decoherence can emerge naturally given the time evolution of the initial state and the final state considered. We have shown that some of the assumptions commonly used in the literature, such as the covariance of the wavepackets, are inconsistent. We found that a crucial ingredient for decoherence is the localization in space-time of the neutrino creation and detection: in Nature, such a measurement is usually carried out by environmental interactions, however it could also be approximated by considering localized wavefunctions in the final state. On the other hand, if the environmental interactions are not present (for example, if the decay happens in vacuum), the final position of the daughter particles will not be measured, i.e. they will be described by plane waves instead: in this case the neutrino is not localized either, and we don't have decoherence. A consequence of the time-evolution is that a Gaussian wavepacket will gradually spread: I will show that such an effect could in principle affect decoherence; moreover it would depend on the absolute mass scale of the neutrino, not on the Δm2\Delta m^2Δm2, which could offer a possible way to probe such a parameter by studying the neutrino oscillations.
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 consider a quantum field theory (QFT) model of neutrino oscillations in vacuum that attempts to take into account that the neutrino source particle and the neutrino detection particle both interact with their respective environments by collisions. Our model is minimal in a twofold sense. Firstly we simply assume that neutrino production and detection take place in between collisions in time intervals ΔtΔtΔt and τττ, respectively. Secondly, we only introduce the two wave packets that are absolutely necessary which are those of the neutrino source and the neutrino detection particle. Within this model we find that, for all practical purposes, there are no decoherence effects in the neutrino oscillation amplitude and oscillations occur in space not in time. Moreover, our model leads to the correct time correlation between neutrino production and detection and to a factorization of the event rate of the compound neutrino production--detection process into decay rate, oscillation probability and detection cross section.
In the view of the quantum dynamic theory of measurement developed from the Hepp-Colemen (HC) model (K. Hepp, Hev.Phys.Acta, {\bf 45}, 237 (1972)), the quantum decoherence in neutrino flavor oscillation caused by an environment surrounding neutrinos is generally considered in this paper. The Ellis, Hagelin, Nanopoulos and Srednicki (EHNS) mechanism for solving the solar neutrino problem can be comprehended in a framework of the ordinary quantum mechanics. In the weak- coupling limit, a microscopic model is proposed to describe the transition of two neutrino system from a pure state to a mixed state. It gives the modified formula of survival probability of neutrino oscillation with two additional time-dependent parameters. For specified environments, this result shows that the oscillating phenomena of neutrino still exist even without a mass difference in free neutrino.