When do neutrinos cease to oscillate?

Abstract

In order to investigate when neutrinos cease to oscillate in the framework of quantum field theory, we have reexamined the wave packet treatment of neutrino oscillations by taking different sizes of the wave packets of the particles involved in the production and detection processes. The treatment is shown to be considerably simplified by using the Grimus-Stockinger theorem which enables us to carry out the integration over the momentum of the propagating neutrino. Our new results confirm the recent observation by Kiers, Nussinov and Weiss that a precise measurement of the energies of the particles involved in the detection process would increase the coherence length. We also present a precise definition of the coherence length beyond which neutrinos cease to oscillate. PACS number(s): 13.15.+g, 14.60.PqTypeset using REVT E X 1

Coherence and Wave Packets in Neutrino Oscillations

“…(4.19) have been also obtained with wave packet treatments of neutrino oscillations in a quantum field theoretical framework in Refs. [36,39,18,10,32]. It is important to remark that the wave packet treatment of neutrino oscillations confirms the standard value in Eq.…”

“…[44] is very interesting for the useful theorem proved in the appendix, which has been used in the quantum field theoretical calculation of neutrino oscillations in the wave packet approach in Refs. [39,10]. Developing the technique proposed in Ref.…”

Phenomenology of neutrino oscillations

“…with momentum p ≫ m k is described by the coherent superposition of mass eigenstates (for a discussion of the quantum mechanical problems of neutrino oscillations see Refs. [61,62,[131][132][133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146])…”

Neutrino flavour states and the quantum theory of neutrino oscillations

“…[5,6,7,8,9]). However, for the justification of some assumptions in the derivation of the oscillation probability, we will need to take into account the wave packet character of propagating massive neutrinos [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39], albeit without need of a specific model.…”