Is the GSI anomaly due to neutrino oscillations? - A real time perspective -

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether neutrino oscillations cause the GSI anomaly by analyzing the decay process in real time and finds no interference effects from neutrino mass eigenstates, challenging previous hypotheses.

Contribution

It provides a real-time quantum analysis of the decay process considering entanglement and shows neutrino oscillations do not produce the GSI anomaly.

Findings

Decay rate shows no time modulation from neutrino interference

Orthogonality of neutrino mass eigenstates prevents interference effects

Density matrix analysis confirms absence of oscillation-induced decay modulation

Abstract

We study a model for the "GSI anomaly" in which we obtain the time evolution of the population of parent and daughter particles directly in real time, considering explicitly the quantum entanglement between the daughter particle and neutrino mass eigenstates in the two-body decay. We confirm that the decay rate of the parent particle and the growth rate of the daughter particle do \emph{not} feature a time modulation from interference of neutrino mass eigenstates. The lack of interference is a consequence of the orthogonality of the mass eigenstates. This result also follows from the density matrix obtained by tracing out the unobserved neutrino states. We confirm this result by providing a complementary explanation based on Cutkosky rules applied to the Feynman diagram that describes the self-energy of the parent particle.