Decoherence Effects of Reactor Neutrino

In the most common theoretical formulation of Neutrino Oscillations neutrinos are described by plane waves. Although this formulation gives the correct oscillation formula verified by experiments it must be considered physically wrong. Several conceptual problems of the plane wave treatment, i.e. violated Lorentz invariance, can be avoided if one uses the QFT with external wave packets approach. There decoherence effects automatically emerge from the formalism. These decoherence effects depend on the localizations of the external particles and are negligible for the standard mass splittings.

This work focuses on reactor neutrino experiments and whether decoherence effects may play a role for the mixing with a potential light sterile neutrino. First, the localizations of the external particles are estimated on physical grounds. Using these results, the decoherence effects on the spectrum of the measured positron in the detector are analysed. Here this work makes use of a consistent treatment of the problem starting from basics feynman rules and without the use of normalizations introduced by hand. The results give no observable decoherence effects.