Chiral oscillations

Abstract

The solutions of the Dirac equation are given in terms of bispinors, four-component objects which include both spin and chirality as internal degrees of freedom. For massive particles, the Dirac equation couples components of the bispinor with different chiralities, yielding chiral oscillations. This phenomenon can be particularly relevant for recent proposals aimed at measuring non-relativistic cosmic neutrinos, and can find analogous in Dirac-like systems, such as graphene. In this paper, a concise review of chiral oscillations is presented, including their description with the Dirac's equation dynamics and the underlying group structure. Two paradigmatic cases of chiral oscillations in physical systems are shown: the effects on lepton-antineutrino spin quantum correlations, and neutrino flavor oscillations. Finally, extensions of recent theoretical investigations as well as future research developments are discussed.

Non-Abelian gauge structure and flavor mixing in quantum field theory1

“…0, they give the Pontecorvo oscillation formulas. Note that the above corrections are of the same order of the chiral oscillation terms [36] which have been not considered here and are also vanishing in the relativistic limit.…”

Chiral and flavor oscillations in lepton-antineutrino spin correlations

“…In [7] it is shown that starting with an initial state at t = 0 with both negative chirality and negative helicity…”

“…In fact, the Dirac equation, describing the temporal evolution of a massive fermion, includes a term which couples left and right-handed components of the bispinor, which yields chirality oscillations [3,4], characterized by the ratio between the momentum and the mass. Chiral oscillations have been studied recently [5][6][7] in connection with their possible relevance for relic neutrinos of the CνB background [8] and more in general in the non-relativistic regime. In particular, the effects of chiral oscillations on the spin-spin correlations of a lepton-antineutrino pair has been investigated in Ref.…”

Nonclassical correlations in two-dimensional graphene lattices

“…Significant attention has also been given to the study of possible applications in graphene-based entanglement [50], quantum memory [51,52] and quantum teleportation [53]. Recently, many research works have studied the dynamics of entanglement in a graphene layer system [50,[54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62].…”