A diagrammatic treatment of neutrino oscillations

• Main Authors: Naumov, Dmitry V, Naumov, Vadim A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 24-08-2010
• Subjects: Physics - High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; Physics - High Energy Physics - Theory; Physics - Quantum Physics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1008.0306

J.Phys.G37:105014,2010 We present a covariant wave-packet approach to neutrino flavor transitions in
vacuum. The approach is based on the technique of macroscopic Feynman diagrams
describing the lepton number violating processes of production and absorption
of virtual massive neutrinos at the macroscopically separated space-time
regions ("source" and "detector"). Accordingly, the flavor transitions are a
result of interference of the diagrams with neutrinos of different masses in
the intermediate states. The statistically averaged probability of the process
is representable as a multidimensional integral of the product of the factors
which describe the differential flux density of massless neutrinos from the
source, differential cross section of the neutrino interaction with the
detector and a dimensionless factor responsible for the flavor transition. The
conditions are analyzed under which the last factor can be treated as the
flavor transition probability in the usual quantum-mechanical sense.