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.
Using the open quantum system approach applied to the neutrino system, we derive three generations neutrino probability formulae considering the oscillation induced by mass plus quantum decoherence contributions. The introduction of these dissipative effects is done through the quantum dynamical semigroup formalism. In addition to the theoretical interest of the approach, at least from the completeness point of view, this extension of the formalism to the three flavors, provide us with a direct application: we can analyze qualitatively the consistency of the two generation pure decoherence solution to the atmospheric neutrino problem, accommodated within this enlarged scheme, with the mean tendencies observed for some of the current neutrino experimental data. This study was performed based on different choices of the
3×3 mixing matrix selected in order to adjust the
Pνμ→νμ to the same form it has for the decoherence solution in two generations. Our qualitative tests for decoherence with three neutrinos show a clear incompatibility between neutrino data and the theoretical expectations.
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+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−A V - A model in
3+1 3 + 1 d, the difference would be simply a total multiplicative factor that would not affect the oscillation probability nor the decoherence.
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.
Neutrino oscillations offer an interferometric setting for open-system dynamics, quantum resources, and parameter estimation. We distinguish two often-conflated statistical families: propagation-basis dephasing uses a survival factor
ηp to damp interference before flavor projection, changing flavor probabilities; effective flavor-mode dephasing suppresses only off-diagonal coherence of a single-particle, two-mode state while fixing its populations. For the two-flavor mode state, we derive exact concurrence, entanglement of formation, and local quantum uncertainty, and reduce one-sided projective discord to a one-parameter optimization. For
0<P<1 and
0<ηm<1, the QFIM in
(P,χ,ηm) is diagonal, with
Hχχmode=Cηm2 and
Hξmξmmode=Cηm2/(1−ηm2), where
ξm=−lnηm. For propagation-basis dephasing, basis-matched QFI and flavor FI separate dynamical information loss from measurement inaccessibility for the mixing angle, mass-squared splitting, and dephasing rate. A monochromatic three-flavor benchmark evaluates the mixed-state QFIM, flavor FIM, and SLD incompatibility for
(θ23,δCP,ξ31,g) at DUNE-like, T2HK-like, and ESSnuSB-inspired points. At
Γ0=10−23GeV, the fixed-coordinate ratio
Fδδflav/Hδδ is approximately
0.010,
0.013, and
0.105, respectively; all three points show strong
θ23--
ξ31 incompatibility. A single-energy flavor measurement supplies only two independent probabilities, so its four-parameter FIM is rank deficient: these diagonal ratios are conditional diagnostics, not joint four-parameter sensitivities. These are state-level information-geometric benchmarks, not event-level sensitivity forecasts.
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, which could offer a possible way to probe such a parameter by studying the neutrino oscillations.
This study examines the dynamics of quantumness in two-flavor neutrino oscillations subjected to a dephasing channel, using representative oscillation parameters associated with the KamLAND, MINOS, and Daya Bay experiments. We analyze three complementary quantum-correlation measures -- entanglement of formation (EOF), quantum discord (QD), and local quantum uncertainty (LQU) -- within an effective two-qubit description. In the unitary case, all three measures display oscillatory behavior controlled by flavor mixing, and their amplitudes are strongly shaped by the relevant mixing angle. MINOS exhibits the largest correlations because
θ23 is close to maximal, KamLAND shows intermediate values associated with the solar sector, and Daya Bay yields smaller correlations due to the relatively small value of
θ13. Under dephasing, the off-diagonal coherence terms are suppressed and the three quantifiers decrease accordingly, while QD remains non-zero in regimes where entanglement is weak. For pure states, LQU satisfies
U=C2 and therefore tracks entanglement monotonically, whereas QD provides a broader witness of non-classical correlations. These results provide a compact quantum-information description of two-flavor neutrino oscillations in both coherent and dephased regimes. We also quantify the sensitivity of these observables to oscillation and decoherence parameters, showing that their main added value relative to flavor probabilities is their direct response to off-diagonal coherence loss.