Optical simulation of neutrino oscillations in binary waveguide arrays

Abstract

We theoretically propose and investigate an optical analogue of neutrino oscillations in a pair of vertically displaced binary waveguide arrays with longitudinally modulated effective refractive index. Optical propagation is modelled through coupled-mode equations, which in the continuous limit lead to two coupled Dirac equations for fermionic particles with different mass states, i.e. neutrinos. We demonstrate that neutrino oscillations can be quenched by nonlinear effects, and we predict the existence of neutrino solitons. Incidentally, these phenomena are expected to play an important role in massive supernova stars. Our results pave the way for using binary waveguide arrays as a classical laboratory for predicting exotic effects in particle physics and astrophysics.

References in corpus (3)

• Theory of Core-Collapse Supernovae
• Quantum simulation of the Klein paradox with trapped ions
• The "Majoranon" and how to realize it in a tabletop experiment

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Flavor vacuum entanglement in boson mixing
• On the flavor/mass dichotomy for mixed neutrinos: a phenomenologically motivated analysis based on lepton charge conservation in neutron decay
• Dynamic diffractive resonant radiation in a linearly chirped nonlinear waveguide array
• Relativistic Zitterbewegung in non-Hermitian photonic waveguide systems
• A comprehensive study on beam dynamics inside symmetrically chirped waveguide array mimicking the graded index media