The quantum field theoretical description of coherence in the oscillations of particles, especially neutrinos, is a standing problem in particle physics. In this talk, several inconsistencies of the standard approach to particle oscillations will be explained, and how they are resolved in a process-independent manner, by a novel approach inspired by the Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer theory of superconductivity and the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. The formalism leads to corrections to the neutrino oscillation probability originally written by Pontecorvo and Gribov, however the standard probability is validated in the ultrarelativistic neutrino limit. The massive neutrino states are interpreted as quasiparticles on a vacuum condensate of "Cooper pairs" of massless flavour neutrinos. The newly defined oscillating particle states are for neutrino oscillations what the Klauder--Sudarshan--Glauber coherent states are for quantum optics.
In this paper, we consider the quantum correlations, coherence and entanglement, in neutrino oscillation. We find that the $l_{1}$-norm as a coherence measure is equal to sum of the three possible concurrences for measuring the entanglement among different flavor modes which were calculated in the paper by (M. Blasone et al., Europhys. Lett., {\bf 112}, 20007). Our result shows that the origin of the flavor entanglement in neutrino oscillation is the same as that of quantum coherence. Furthermore, in the wave packet framework, the variation of $l_{1}$-norm is investigated by varying the wave p…
We present a prescription for consistently constructing non-Fock coherent flavour neutrino states within the framework of the seesaw mechanism, and establish that the physical vacuum of massive neutrinos is a condensate of Standard Model massless neutrino states. The coherent states, involving a finite number of massive states, are derived by constructing their creation operator. Such a construction is the key requirement so that the oscillations of particles indeed occur. We comment on the inherent non-unitarity of the oscillation probability induced by the requirement of coherence.
We analyze quantum correlations and quantum coherence in neutrino oscillations. To this end, we exploit complete complementarity relations (CCR) that fully characterize the interplay between different correlations encoded in a quantum system both for pure and mixed states. We consider the CCR for neutrino oscillations both in the case of plane-waves (pure state) and of wave packets (mixed state). In this last case we find a complex structure of correlations depending on the mixing angle, and we show the connection with the non local advantage of quantum coherence, a relevant quantifier of cohe…
We study the effect of coherent and incoherent broadening on neutrino oscillations both in vacuum and in the presence of matter (the MSW effect). We show under very general assumptions that it is not possible to distinguish experimentally neutrinos produced in some region of space as wave packets from those produced in the same region of space as plane waves with the same energy distribution.
Leggett-Garg Inequality~(LGI) is a time analogue of Bell's inequality that concerns measurements performed on a system at different times. Violation to LGI indicates quantum coherence. We present a Leggett-Garg-type inequality compatible with more general neutrino oscillation frameworks, allowing the effects of decoherence to be taken into consideration. The inequality is applied to test coherence for data from Daya Bay, MINOS, and KamLAND experiments, and their results are compared to theoretical predictions to investigate decoherence. Both Daya Bay and MINOS data exhibit clear violations of …
The apparent symmetry between energy and momentum found in all covariant descriptions of neutrino oscillations is destroyed in the neutrino detector, a quantum mechanical system described by a density matrix diagonal in energy but not in momentum. The off diagonal matrix elements between states of different momenta and the same energy produce the coherence and interference between mass eigenstates having the same energy and different momenta that produce oscillations.
The definition of `lepton flavour eigenstates' introduced in a recent paper hep-ph/0302045 is in disagreement with the Standard Model prediction for the structure of the leptonic charged current and implies the absence of neutrino oscillations following pion decay, in contradiction to experimental data
The temporal and spatial coherence widths of the microscopic process by which a neutrino is detected are incorporated in the quantum mechanical wave packet treatment of neutrino oscillations, confirming the observation of Kiers, Nussinov and Weiss that an accurate measurement of the energies of the particles participating in the detection process can increase the coherence length. However, the wave packet treatment presented here shows that the coherence length has an upper bound, determined by the neutrino energy and the mass-squared difference, beyond which the coherence of the oscillation p…
A closer and more detailed study of neutrino oscillation, in addition to assisting us in founding physics beyond the standard model, can potentially be used to understand the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. In particular, we know that the neutrino oscillation occurs because the quantum states of the produced and detected neutrinos are a coherent superposition of the mass eigenstates, and this coherency is maintained during the propagation due to the small mass difference of neutrinos. In this paper, we consider the decoherence due to the neutrino interaction in the material medium wi…
General arguments in favor of the necessity of a wave packet description of neutrino oscillations are presented, drawing from analogies with other wave phenomena. We present a wave packet description of neutrino oscillations in stationary beams using the density matrix formalism. Recent claims of the necessity of an equal energy of different massive neutrinos are refuted.
In this paper, we investigate the quantum coherence for two flavor neutrinos propagating in a Schwarzschild metric. In fact, this issue is explored both qualitatively via calculating the parameter $K_{3}$ in Leggett-Garg inequality (LGI) and also quantitatively by evaluating the $l_{1}$-norm, ${\cal C}(ρ)$. Using the weak field approximations, we show that the gravitational effects decrease the maximum value of $K_{3}$ for some intervals of energy such a way that there is no violation, while it leaves the maximum amount of the quantum coherence, ${\cal C}(ρ)$ unchanged.
The radical departure from classical physics implies quantum coherence, i.e., coherent superposition of eigenstates of Hermitian operators with a discrete spectrum. In resource theory, quantum coherence is a resource for quantum operations. Typically the stochastic phenomenon induces decoherence effects. However, in the present work, we prove that nonunitary evolution leads to the generation of quantum coherence in some cases. Specifically, we consider the neutrino propagation in the dissipative environment, namely in a magnetic field with a stochastic component, and focus on neutrino flavor, …
Neutrino oscillation represents an intriguing physical phenomenon where the quantumness can be maintained and detected over a long distance. Previously, the non-classical character of neutrino oscillation was tested with the Leggett-Garg inequality, where a clear violation of the classical bound was observed [J. A. Formaggio et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 050402 (2016)]. However, there are several limitations in testing neutrino oscillations with the Leggett-Garg inequality. In particular, the degree of violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality cannot be taken as a "measure of quantumness". Here…
We study two-flavor neutrino oscillations in a homogeneous and isotropic ensemble under the influence of neutrino-neutrino interactions. For any density there exist forms of collective oscillations that show self-maintained coherence. They can be classified by a number N of linearly independent functions that describe all neutrino modes as linear superpositions. What is more, the dynamics is equivalent to another ensemble with the same effective density, consisting of N modes with discrete energies E_i with i=1, ..., N. We use this equivalence to derive the analytic solution for two-mode (bimo…
The standard wave function approach for the treatment of neutrino oscillations fails in situations where quantum ensembles at a finite temperature with or without an interacting background plasma are encountered. As a first step to treat such phenomena in a novel way, we propose a unified approach to both adiabatic and non-adiabatic two-flavor oscillations in neutrino ensembles with finite temperature and generic (e.g. matter) potentials. Neglecting effects of ensemble decoherence for now we study the evolution of a neutrino ensemble governed by the associated Quantum Kinetic Equations, which …
We study the propagation coherence for neutrino oscillations in media with different density profiles. For each profile, we find the dependence of the coherence length, $L_{coh}$, on neutrino energy and address the issue of correspondence of results in the distance and energy-momentum representations. The key new feature in matter is existence of energy ranges with enhanced coherence around the energies $E_0$ of "infinite coherence" at which $L_{coh} \rightarrow \infty$. In the configuration space, the infinite coherence corresponds to equality of the (effective) group velocities of the eigens…
In charged current weak interaction processes, neutrinos are produced in an entangled state with the charged lepton. This correlated state is disentangled by the measurement of the charged lepton in a detector at the production site. We study the dynamical aspects of disentanglement, propagation and detection, in particular the conditions under which the disentangled state is a coherent superposition of mass eigenstates. The appearance and disappearance far-detection processes are described from the time evolution of this disentangled "collapsed" state. The familiar quantum mechanical interpre…
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 $π\, L_s/L_{osc}$ where $L_s$ is the \emph{smallest} of the decay lengt…
Neutrino oscillations are only observable when the neutrino production, propagation and detection coherence conditions are satisfied. In this paper we consider in detail neutrino production coherence, taking π\to μν\ decay as an example. We compare the oscillation probabilities obtained in two different ways: (1) coherent summation of the amplitudes of neutrino production at different points along the trajectory of the parent pion; (2) averaging of the standard oscillation probability over the neutrino production coordinate in the source. We demonstrate that the results of these two different …
We study the $ν_μ- ν_s$ oscillation effects in the near detector of the MINOS experiment. Conceptually, the MINOS search for sterile neutrinos with mass $\sim 1$ eV realizes an interesting situation of partial decoherence of the neutrino state at the production. This corresponds to a difference of energies of the two mass eigenstates that is comparable with or bigger than the width of the initial state (pion). We show that these effects modify the MINOS bound on mixing of sterile neutrino for $Δm^2_{41} \aprge 0.5$ eV$^2$ and make the experiment insensitive to oscillations with $Δm^2_{41} \gtr…
We consider a novel quantum field-theoretical approach to the description of processes passing at finite space-time intervals based on the Feynman diagram technique in the coordinate representation. The most known processes of this type are neutrino and neutral kaon oscillations. The experimental setting of these processes requires one to adjust the rules of passing to the momentum representation in the Feynman diagram technique in accordance with it, which leads to a modification of the Feynman propagator in the momentum representation. The approach does not make use of wave packets, both ini…
Response of Hellinger-distance based coherence to weak decoherence in two-flavor neutrino oscillations
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（坎普尔印度理工学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（甘地纳加尔印度理工学院）；LPC Caen, Normandie Univ, ENSICAEN, UNICAEN, CNRS/IN2P3（卡昂粒子与核物理实验室，诺曼底大学，ENSICAEN，UNICAEN，CNRS/IN2P3）
A Feynman path integral analysis of a two-neutrino-flavour electron appearence experiment following pion decay at rest recovers the standard oscillation phase, revealing an important contribution from the decay amplitude of the pion as well as an error in previous similar calculations by the present author. In the calculation, path amplitudes for different neutrino mass eigenstates add coherently, but no putative `neutrino flavour eigenstates' are invoked. It is shown that the coherent production of the latter states is incompatible with the measured values of $Γ(π\rightarrow {\rm e}ν)/Γ(π\rig…
We study the conditions for the existence of neutrino oscillations in the field-theoretical approach which combines neutrino production and detection processes in a single Feynman graph. The ``oscillating neutrino'' is represented by an inner line of this graph where, due to the macroscopic distance L between source and detector, the neutrino propagators for neutrinos with definite mass are replaced by the projection operators unto the neutrino states on mass shell. We use as a concrete model reaction the neutrino source and detector as given in the LSND experiment and we carefully take into a…
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 wil…
Simple rigorous quantum mechanics with no hand waving nor loopholes clarifies the confusion between three contradictory descriptions of neutrino oscillations: (1)The time oscillations shown in standard textbooks produced by neutrino eigenstates with different masses and different energies. (2) That time oscillations and interference between states having different energies cannot be observed in realistic experiments. (3) That interference between different neutrino mass eigenstates is not observable in "missing mass" experiments where information determining the neutrino mass is available from…
Several measures of quantum correlations such as Leggett-Garg and Bell-type inequalities have been extensively studied in the context of neutrino oscillations. However these analyses are performed under the assumption of standard model (SM) interactions of neutrinos. In this work we study new physics effects on $l_1$-norm based measure of quantum coherence which quantifies the quantumness embedded in the system and is also intrinsically related to various measures of quantum correlations. Moreover, it is considered to be a resource theoretical tool which can be utilized in quantum algorithms a…
The dynamics of neutrino mixing and oscillations are studied directly in finite real time in a model that effectively describes charged current weak interactions. Finite time corrections to the S-matrix result for the appearance and disappearance probabilities are obtained. It is observed that these effects may be of the same order of the S-matrix result in long-baseline appearance experiments. We argue that fundamentally, the S-matrix is ill-suited to describe long-baseline events due to the fact that the neutrino is produced in an entangled state with the charged lepton, which can be disenta…
Analytical solutions are obtained to the nonlinear equations describing neutrino oscillations when explicit neutrino-antineutrino asymmetries are present. Such a system occurs in the early Universe if neutrinos have a non-zero chemical potential. Solutions to the equations lead to a new type of coherent behavior governed by two modes. These bimodal solutions provide new insights into dense neutrino gases and into neutrino oscillations in the early Universe, thereby allowing one to surmise the flavor behavior of neutrinos with a non-zero chemical potential.
Supernova neutrinos have several exceptional features which can lead to interesting physical consequences. At the production point their wave packets have an extremely small size $σ_x \sim 10^{-11}$ cm; hence the energy uncertainty can be as large as the energy itself, $σ_E \sim E$, and the coherence length is short. On the way to the Earth the wave packets of mass eigenstates spread to macroscopic sizes and separate. Inside the Earth the mass eigenstates split into eigenstates in matter and oscillate again. The coherence length in the Earth is comparable with the radius of the Earth. We explo…
We reconsider the extrinsic and possible intrinsic CPT violation in neutrino oscillations, and point out an identity, i.e., $A^{\rm CP}_{αβ} = A^{\rm CPT}_{βα} + A^{\rm T}_{αβ}$, among the CP, T, and CPT asymmetries in oscillations. For three-flavor oscillations in matter of constant density, the extrinsic CPT asymmetries $A^{\rm CPT}_{ee}$, $A^{\rm CPT}_{eμ}$, $A^{\rm CPT}_{μe}$, and $A^{\rm CPT}_{μμ}$ caused by Earth matter effects have been calculated in the plane of different neutrino energies and baseline lengths. It is found that two analytical conditions can be implemented to describe t…
In this paper we consider the coherence properties of neutrinos produced by the decays of pions in conventional neutrino beams. Using a multi-particle density matrix formalism we derive the oscillation probability for neutrinos emitted by a decaying pion in an arbitrary quantum state. Then, using methods from decoherence theory we calculate the pion state which evolves through interaction with decay-pipe gases in a typical accelerator neutrino experiment. These two ingredients are used to obtain the distance scales for neutrino beam coherence loss. We find that for the known neutrino mass spli…
In this talk, we will demonstrate some concepts of a simultaneous treatment of neutrino decays and neutrino oscillations in an illustrative manner. This includes topics such as phase coherence discussions and time delay effects of massive supernova neutrinos.
Using an analogy with the well-known double-slit experiment, we show that the standard phase of neutrino oscillations is correct, refuting recent claims of a factor of two correction. We also improve the wave packet treatment of neutrino oscillations taking into account explicitly the finite coherence time of the detection process.
