Abstract
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 $\sigma$ confidence level.
Highlights
Much information regarding neutrino mixing have been revealed in the past few decades
Even if the plane-wave treatment is a good approximation for neutrino flavor transitions, the wave-packet decoherence and dispersion effects could still give rise to small corrections to oscillation parameters
The wave-packet treatment does not produce significant modifications of the mixing parameters measured by current reactor neutrino experiments based on the plane-wave analysis
Summary
Much information regarding neutrino mixing have been revealed in the past few decades. In most oscillation data analyses, neutrinos are described as plane waves with definite energy and momentum. We investigate the wave-packet treatment in detail, constrain the energy uncertainty σwp of reactor anti-neutrinos, and calculate corrections to the mixing parameters by the. The wave-packet treatment does not produce significant modifications of the mixing parameters measured by current reactor neutrino experiments based on the plane-wave analysis. If the initial momentum/energy uncertainty of the neutrino wave packet is larger than around 0.02 of the neutrino energy, the decoherence and dispersion effects could have significant effects on future measurements of the neutrino mass hierarchy. We apply a wave-packet treatment to neutrino oscillations [3,4,5,6,7,8,9] and examine its phenomenological implications on reactor neutrino experiments at medium baseline.
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