Can a spontaneous collapse in flavour oscillations be tested at KLOE?

Abstract

Abstract. Why do we never see a table in a superposition of here and there? This problem gets a solution by so called collapse models assuming the collapse as a genuinely physical process. Here we consider two specific collapse models and apply them to systems at high energies, i.e. flavour oscillating neutral meson systems. We find on one hand a potentially new interpretation of the decay rates introduced by hand in the standard formalism and on the other hand that these systems at high energies constrain by experimental data the possible collapse scenarios.

Particle mixing and the emergence of classicality: A spontaneous-collapse-model view

“…In other words, a broader class of time-asymmetric collapse models can in principle gain the decay property of neutral mesons. As shown in [55,56], such a collapse model makes possible to predict the absolute masses m H/L of the lifetime eigenstates as well as the collapse parameters λ and β using the experimentally measured values of the decay constants Γ H/L and the difference of masses ∆m = m H − m L . We discuss these interesting consequences of the spontaneous collapse dynamics in the following Section.…”

“…Now, we turn to the collapse models acting in the Hilbert space L 2 (R d ) ⊗ H M with d = 1, 2, 3, which combines the position and flavor spaces, and the collapse is assumed to the spatial part of the state of the system. For the sake of concreteness, we consider the QMUPL and the mass-proportional CSL models, which were widely analyzed in the context of flavor oscillations [51][52][53][54][55][56], and generalize them to the models with the time-asymmetric noise field. In this way, we analyze the quantum state equation…”

“…for |ψ in,out ∈ H M , where Û (t) is the evolution operator due to the quantum state equation (32). The detailed perturbative calculations of ( 36) for the lifetime eigenstates |M i and the flavor states |M 0 / M 0 are already known in literature [52,[54][55][56], hence, we choose a simpler procedure and stick to the class of master equations in accordance with (31), namely,…”

“…It has been put under discussion whether the spontaneous collapse can be considered also as a source of the particle decay [54][55][56]. It has been shown that the decay dynamics can be recovered by the mass-proportional CSL model with an asymmetric correlation function of the noise field underlying this collapse model.…”

“…In this paper, we review the results of [54][55][56] in the context of the master equation associated with a collapse model and investigate how the noise field affects the dynamics of neutral mesons. We derive a class of collapse models with a free choice of time-asymmetry of the underlying white noise field and show that the decay property of a flavor oscillating system (or its absence) can be governed by the corresponding spontaneous collapse dynamics in accordance with [55].…”