Damping of neutrino oscillations, decoherence and the lengths of neutrino wave packets

Abstract

Spatial separation of the wave packets (WPs) of neutrino mass eigenstates leads to decoherence and damping of neutrino oscillations. Damping can also be caused by finite energy resolution of neutrino detectors or, in the case of experiments with radioactive neutrino sources, by finite width of the emitted neutrino line. We study in detail these two types of damping effects using reactor neutrino experiments and experiments with radioactive ${}^{51}$Cr source as examples. We demonstrate that the effects of decoherence by WP separation can always be incorporated into a modification of the energy resolution function of the detector and so are intimately entangled with it. We estimate for the first time the lengths ${\sigma }_x$ of WPs of reactor neutrinos and neutrinos from a radioactive ${}^{51}$Cr source. The obtained values, ${\sigma }_x=(2\times 10^{-5}-1.4\times 10^{-4})$ cm, are at least six orders of magnitude larger than the currently available experimental lower bounds. We conclude that effects of decoherence by WP separation cannot be probed in reactor and radioactive source experiments.

LaTeX 21 pages, 1 figure. v2: typos fixed; minor textual changes; results and conclusions unchanged

References in corpus (6)

• Results from the Baksan Experiment on Sterile Transitions (BEST)
• Coherence and oscillations of cosmic neutrinos
• BEST Impact on Sterile Neutrino Hypothesis
• Dynamical Pion Collapse and the Coherence of Conventional Neutrino Beams
• Combined analysis of neutrino decoherence at reactor experiments
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• Decoherence in Neutrino Oscillation at the ESSnuSB Experiment
• On neutrino-mediated potentials in a neutrino background
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• Impact of different neutrino decoherence formalisms at the future long-baseline Experiments
• Neutrino Oscillations in the Three Flavor Paradigm