Spatial entanglement and massive neutrino oscillations produced by orbital electron capture decay

TL;DR

This paper models the joint wave function of neutrino and recoil nucleus from electron capture decay, revealing spatial entanglement and proposing experiments to observe neutrino oscillations via recoil correlations.

Contribution

It provides a novel physical realization of EPR entanglement involving neutrinos and predicts observable oscillations through spatial correlations.

Findings

Neutrino-recoil entanglement arises from momentum conservation.

Neutrino oscillations can be observed in coincidence experiments.

Wave packet structure is crucial for understanding entanglement and oscillations.

Abstract

The two-particle wave function of neutrino and recoil nucleus is found as a solution of an initial value problem in the far zone for a time longer than the electron capture decay lifetime of a hydrogenlike ion. The neutrino-recoil entanglement arising in such a process is a consequence of the momentum conservation and is closely related to the wave packet structure of the state. Because of neutrino mixing, the joint wave packet involves the coherent superposition of the neutrino mass eigenstate packets. This is the new physical realization of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment, which has no analogue in quantum optics and quantum informatics. A class of possible experiments for the registration of a neutrino and a recoil nucleus is proposed. It is shown that due to spatial correlations neutrino oscillations can be observed in the coincidence experiment with the recoil.