Wave-packet treatment of reactor neutrino oscillation experiments and its implications on determining the neutrino mass hierarchy

We derive the neutrino flavor transition probabilities with the neutrino treated as a wave packet. The decoherence and dispersion effects from the wave-packet treatment show up as damping and phase-shifting of the plane-wave neutrino oscillation patterns. If the energy uncertainty in the initial neu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields Particles and fields, 2016-06, Vol.76 (6), p.1, Article 310
Main Authors: Chan, Yat-Long, Chu, M.-C., Tsui, Ka Ming, Wong, Chan Fai, Xu, Jianyi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Astronomy
Astrophysics and Cosmology
Elementary Particles
Hadrons
Heavy Ions
Information management
Measurement Science and Instrumentation
Nuclear Energy
Nuclear Physics
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum Field Theories
Quantum Field Theory
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
String Theory
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Summary:We derive the neutrino flavor transition probabilities with the neutrino treated as a wave packet. The decoherence and dispersion effects from the wave-packet treatment show up as damping and phase-shifting of the plane-wave neutrino oscillation patterns. If the energy uncertainty in the initial neutrino wave packet is larger than around 0.01 of the neutrino energy, the decoherence and dispersion effects would degrade the sensitivity of reactor neutrino experiments to mass hierarchy measurement to lower than 3 σ confidence level.
ISSN:1434-6044
1434-6052
DOI:10.1140/epjc/s10052-016-4143-4