Exploration of Possible Quantum Gravity Effects with Neutrinos I: Decoherence in Neutrino Oscillations Experiments

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quantum gravity-induced stochastic fluctuations could cause decoherence in neutrino oscillations, and evaluates the potential of experiments like CNGS and J-PARC to constrain such effects.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent framework to analyze quantum gravity effects on neutrino decoherence and assesses experimental bounds using neutrino oscillation data.

Findings

Neutrino experiments can set bounds on quantum gravity decoherence parameters.

Decoherence effects lead to fewer detected active neutrinos in long baseline experiments.

Model-independent parameterizations effectively constrain quantum gravity models.

Abstract

Quantum gravity may involve models with stochastic fluctuations of the associated metric field, around some fixed background value. Such stochastic models of gravity may induce decoherence for matter propagating in such fluctuating space time. In most cases, this leads to fewer neutrinos of all active flavours being detected in a long baseline experiment as compared to three-flavour standard neutrino oscillations. We discuss the potential of the CNGS and J-PARC beams in constraining models of quantum-gravity induced decoherence using neutrino oscillations as a probe. We use as much as possible model-independent parameterizations, even though they are motivated by specific microscopic models, for fits to the expected experimental data which yield bounds on quantum-gravity decoherence parameters.