Coherence and oscillations of cosmic neutrinos

Abstract

For cosmic neutrinos we study the conditions and the effects of the coherence loss as well as coherent broadening of the spectrum. We evaluate the width of the neutrino wavepacket produced by charged particles under various circumstances: in an interaction-free environment, in a radiation-dominated medium (typical of the sources of the gamma ray bursts) and in the presence of a magnetic field. The effect of the magnetic field on the wavepacket size appears to be more important than the scattering. If the magnetic field at the source is larger than $\sim$10 Gauss, the coherence of neutrinos will be lost while traveling over cosmological distances. Various applications of these results have been considered. We find that for large magnetic fields ($B>10^9$ Gauss) and high energies ($E_{\nu }>\mathrm{PeV}$), "coherent broadening" can modify the energy spectrum of neutrinos. In the coherent case, averaging out the oscillatory terms of the probabilities does not induce any statistical uncertainty beyond what expected in the absence of these terms. A deviation from the standard quantum mechanics that preserves average energy and unitarity cannot alter the picture.

31 pages; A discussion on "coherent broadening" is added

References in corpus (8)

• Gamma-Ray Bursts: Progress, Problems & Prospects
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• Revealing the Supernova--Gamma-Ray Burst Connection with TeV Neutrinos
• Probing non-standard decoherence effects with solar and KamLAND neutrinos
• How astrophysical neutrino sources could be used for early measurements of neutrino mass hierarchy and leptonic CP phase
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• State-of-the-Art Collapsar Jet Simulations Imply Undetectable Subphotospheric Neutrinos
• Neutrino Emission from Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients
• Microscopic and Macroscopic Effects in the Decoherence of Neutrino Oscillations
• Quantum mechanics aspects and subtleties of neutrino oscillations
• Multi-messenger detection prospects of gamma-ray burst afterglows with optical jumps
• Neutrino Flavor Detection at Neutrino Telescopes and Its Uses
• CPT invariance and neutrino physics
• Neutrino Interaction Physics in Neutrino Telescopes
• Oscillations of High-Energy Cosmic Neutrinos in the Copious MeV Neutrino Background
• Neutrino Decoherence via Modified Dispersion
• Status and Perspectives of Neutrino Physics
• Seesaw, coherence and neutrino oscillations
• Using Neutrino Oscillations to Measure $H_0$?