Quantum coherence in neutrino oscillation in matter

Abstract

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 with constant density in addition to the decoherence coming from the localization properties. For this purpose, we use l1-norm in order to quantify the coherence and investigate its dependence on the matter density. According to our results, in general, the coherence in material medium is less than vacuum. However, there exist exceptions; for some matter densities, the localization coherence lengths become infinite. So, for these cases, l1-norm in matter is more than the vacuum.