A field-theoretical approach to entanglement in neutrino mixing and oscillations

Abstract

The phenomena of particle mixing and flavor oscillations in elementary-particle physics can be addressed from the point of view of quantum information theory, and described in terms of multi-mode entanglement of single-particle states. In this paper we show that such a description can be extended to the domain of quantum field theory, where we uncover a fine structure of quantum correlations associated with multi-mode, multi-particle entanglement. By means of an entanglement measure based on the linear entropies associated with all the possible bipartitions, we analyze the entanglement in the states of flavor neutrinos and antineutrinos. Remarkably, we show that the entanglement is connected with experimentally measurable quantities, i.e. the variances of the lepton numbers and charges.