Oscillations of Mossbauer neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that neutrinos emitted and detected via the Mossbauer effect, despite their monochromatic nature, can oscillate, with quantum field theory calculations supporting potential experimental observations.

Contribution

It provides a first-principles quantum field theory analysis of Mossbauer neutrino oscillations, extending previous qualitative discussions and predicting transition rates for future experiments.

Findings

Neutrinos oscillate despite near-monochromatic emission.

Decoherence and delocalization effects are negligible in realistic conditions.

Quantitative predictions for transition rates are provided for experimental setups.

Abstract

We calculate the probability of recoilless emission and detection of neutrinos (Mossbauer effect with neutrinos) taking into account the boundedness of the parent and daughter nuclei in the neutrino source and detector as well as the leptonic mixing. We show that, in spite of their near monochromaticity, the recoillessly emitted and captured neutrinos oscillate. After a qualitative discussion of this issue, we corroborate and extend our results by computing the combined rate of $\bar{\nu}_e$ production, propagation and detection in the framework of quantum field theory, starting from first principles. This allows us to avoid making any a priori assumptions about the energy and momentum of the intermediate-state neutrino. Our calculation permits quantitative predictions of the transition rate in future experiments, and shows that the decoherence and delocalization factors, which could in principle suppress neutrino oscillations, are irrelevant under realistic experimental conditions.