Short baseline neutrino oscillations: when entanglement suppresses coherence

Abstract

For neutrino oscillations to take place the entangled quantum state of a neutrino and a charged lepton produced via charged current interactions must be disentangled. Implementing a non-perturbative Wigner-Weisskopf method we obtain the correct \emph{entangled} quantum state of neutrinos and charged leptons from the (two-body) decay of a parent particle. The source lifetime and disentanglement length scale lead to a suppression of the oscillation probabilities in short-baseline experiments. The suppression is determined by $\pi L_s/L_{osc}$ where $L_s$ is the \emph{smallest} of the decay length of the parent particle or the disentanglement length scale. For $L_s\ge L_{osc}$ coherence and oscillations are suppressed. These effects are more prominent in \emph{short base line experiments} and at low neutrino energy. We obtain the corrections to the appearance and disappearance probabilities modified by both the lifetime of the source and the disentanglement scale and discuss their implications for accelerator and reactor experiments. These effects imply that fits to the experimental data based on the usual quantum mechanical formulation \emph{underestimate} ${\sin }^2(2\theta )$ and $\delta m^2$, and are more dramatic for $\delta m^2\simeq {\mathrm{eV}}^2$, the mass range for new generations of sterile neutrinos that could explain the short-baseline anomalies.

29 pages, 6 figures, revised MiniBooNE estimates, matches published version

References in corpus (18)

• The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly
• Improved Predictions of Reactor Antineutrino Spectra
• Phenomenology with Massive Neutrinos
• Event Excess in the MiniBooNE Search for ${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }\to {\bar{\nu }}_e$ Oscillations
• Sterile neutrino oscillations after first MiniBooNE results
• Short-Baseline Active-Sterile Neutrino Oscillations?
• Robust Cosmological Bounds on Neutrinos and their Combination with Oscillation Results
• Neutrino oscillations: Entanglement, energy-momentum conservation and QFT
• MiniBooNE and LSND data: non-standard neutrino interactions in a (3+1) scheme versus (3+2) oscillations
• nu_e Disappearance in MiniBooNE
• On the Perturbative Stability of Quantum Field Theories in de Sitter Space
• Neutrino Flavor States and the Quantum Theory of Neutrino Oscillations
• On a theory of neutrino oscillations with entanglement
• Short-Baseline antinu_mu -> antinu_e Oscillations
• Space-time propagation of neutrino wave packets at high temperature and density
• Is the GSI anomaly due to neutrino oscillations? - A real time perspective -
• On the evolution of an entangled lepton-neutrino pair
• Neutrino oscillations with disentanglement of a neutrino from its partners

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Entanglement and collective flavor oscillations in a dense neutrino gas
• Condensates and quasiparticles in inflationary cosmology: mass generation and decay widths
• A field-theoretical approach to entanglement in neutrino mixing and oscillations
• Flavor entanglement in neutrino oscillations in the wave packet description
• Dynamical Pion Collapse and the Coherence of Conventional Neutrino Beams
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking in inflationary cosmology: on the fate of Goldstone Bosons
• Nearly degenerate heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decay: mixing and oscillations
• Searching for sterile neutrinos from $\pi$ and $K$ decays
• Neutrino Oscillation Measurements Computed in Quantum Field Theory
• Superhorizon entanglement entropy from particle decay in inflation
• Coherence and decoherence in photon spin-qubit entanglement
• Comment on "Spin correlations in elastic $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ scattering in QED"
• Charged lepton mixing via heavy sterile neutrinos
• Entangled Neutrino States in a Toy Model QFT