Abstract
We analyze the problem of neutrino oscillations via a fermionic particle detector model inspired by the physics of the Fermi theory of weak interactions. The model naturally leads to a description of emission and absorption of neutrinos in terms of localized two-level systems. By explicitly including source and detector as part of the dynamics, the formalism is shown to recover the standard results for neutrino oscillations without mention to "flavor states", which are ill defined in quantum field theory. This illustrates how particle detector models provide a powerful theoretical tool to approach the measurement issue in quantum field theory and emphasizes that the notion of flavor states, although sometimes useful, must not play any crucial role in neutrino phenomenology.
Highlights
Neutrinos have become one of the greatest protagonists in the search for hints of physics beyond the Standard Model
One of the most direct indications that neutrinos provide for the need of extensions of the Standard Model comes from the phenomenon of flavor oscillations, which implies that the neutrinos are massive, and that the neutrinos with well-defined flavor—which couple directly to the charged leptons through the weak interactions—are linear combinations of the neutrinos with well-defined mass
We have successfully described the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations without the need of flavor states, by using particle detectors to model the emission and absorption of neutrinos in charged-current weak interactions
Summary
The major purpose of the present paper is to phrase the phenomenology of neutrino oscillations with the explicit use of particle detector models in a way that naturally precludes the notion of neutrino flavor states. III, we consider the simplified case where fermionic fields with flavor mixing are replaced by scalar ones and show how a suitable UDW model can describe emission and absorption processes of “scalar” neutrinos It clarifies how the standard picture of flavor oscillations can be rephrased in terms of detector observables. We will assume metric signature ðþ; −; −; −Þ and natural units, ħ 1⁄4 c 1⁄4 1, unless stated otherwise
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