Abstract
We analyze the effects of gravity on neutrino wave packet decoherence. As a specific example, we consider the gravitational field of a spinning spherical body described by the Lense–Thirring metric. By working in the weak-field limit and employing Gaussian wave packets, we show that the characteristic coherence length of neutrino oscillation processes is nontrivially affected, with the corrections being dependent on the mass and angular velocity of the gravity source. Possible experimental implications are finally discussed.
Highlights
The influence of gravity on neutrino decoherence was investigated within the framework of the density matrix with Gaussian wave packets (WPs)
We considered the gravitational field around a spinning spherical body described by the Lense–Thirring metric
By working in the weak field, we derived the effective coherence length for relativistic neutrinos, showing that it is nontrivially modified with respect to the flat case
Summary
Following [33], we resort to the density matrix approach and evaluate the coherence length in terms of the neutrino local energy, which is the energy measured by an inertial observer at rest at a finite radius in the gravitational field In this sense, our calculation differs from that of [33], where the final result is exhibited as a function of the asymptotic energy of neutrinos. The layout of the paper is as follows: In Section 2, we review the density matrix approach to describing neutrino WP decoherence in flat spacetime. For this purpose, we follow [31,33].
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