Neutrino oscillations in a stochastic model for space-time foam

TL;DR

This paper investigates how stochastic space-time foam models cause decoherence in neutrino oscillations, analyzing model dependence and potential experimental sensitivity, especially from high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, to constrain quantum gravity effects.

Contribution

It demonstrates the model dependence of decoherence effects in neutrino oscillations and assesses the potential of current and future experiments to detect or constrain these effects.

Findings

Decoherence damping coefficients depend on the specific foam model.

Future neutrino observations could approach the theoretically expected decoherence levels.

High-energy astrophysical neutrinos are promising probes for quantum gravity-induced decoherence.

Abstract

We study decoherence models for flavour oscillations in four-dimensional stochastically fluctuating space times and discuss briefly the sensitivity of current neutrino experiments to such models. We pay emphasis on demonstrating the model dependence of the associated decoherence-induced damping coefficients in front of the oscillatory terms in the respective transition probabilities between flavours. Within the context of specific models of foam, involving point-like D-branes and leading to decoherence-induced damping which is inversely proportional to the neutrino energies, we also argue that future limits on the relevant decoherence parameters coming from TeV astrophysical neutrinos, to be observed in ICE-CUBE, are not far from theoretically expected values with Planck mass suppression. Ultra high energy neutrinos from Gamma Ray Bursts at cosmological distances can also exhibit in principle sensitivity to such effects.