Damping of neutrino oscillations, decoherence and the lengths of neutrino wave packets

Abstract

Abstract Spatial separation of the wave packets (WPs) of neutrino mass eigenstates leads to decoherence and damping of neutrino oscillations. Damping can also be caused by finite energy resolution of neutrino detectors or, in the case of experiments with radioactive neutrino sources, by finite width of the emitted neutrino line. We study in detail these two types of damping effects using reactor neutrino experiments and experiments with radioactive 51Cr source as examples. We demonstrate that the effects of decoherence by WP separation can always be incorporated into a modification of the energy resolution function of the detector and so are intimately entangled with it. We estimate for the first time the lengths σx of WPs of reactor neutrinos and neutrinos from a radioactive 51Cr source. The obtained values, σx = (2 × 10−5 − 1.4 × 10−4) cm, are at least six orders of magnitude larger than the currently available experimental lower bounds. We conclude that effects of decoherence by WP separation cannot be probed in reactor and radioactive source experiments.