English

Neutrino oscillations in space within a solvable model

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-10-31 v2 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

We study neutrino oscillations in space within a realistic model in which both the source and the target are considered to be stationary having Gaussian-form localizations. The model admits an exact analytic solution in field theory which may be expressed in terms of complementary error functions, thereby allowing for a quantitative discussion of quantum-mechanical (coherent) versus statistical (incoherent) uncertainties. The solvable model provides an insightful framework in addressing questions related to propagation and oscillation of neutrinos that may not be attainable by the existing approaches. We find a novel form of plane-wave behaviour of neutrino oscillations if the localization spread of the source and target states due to quantum mechanics is of macroscopic size but much smaller than neutrinos' oscillation length. Finally, we discuss the limits on the coherence length of neutrino oscillations and find that they mainly arise from uncertainties of statistical origin.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/9809503,
  title  = {Neutrino oscillations in space within a solvable model},
  author = {Ara Ioannisian and Apostolos Pilaftsis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/9809503},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

17 pages, ReVTeX, clarifications added

R2 v1 2026-07-22T14:46:26.895Z