The effect of spontaneous collapses on neutrino oscillations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spontaneous collapse models, specifically the mass proportional CSL model, subtly influence neutrino oscillations, revealing effects that are theoretically interesting but practically undetectable due to their minuscule magnitude.

Contribution

It provides a detailed calculation of collapse model effects on neutrino oscillations using second order perturbation theory, highlighting their negligible size.

Findings

Collapse effects are very small due to neutrino mass

Predicted effects are practically undetectable

Collapse modifies wave function evolution similar to matter effects

Abstract

We compute the effect of collapse models on neutrino oscillations. The effect of the collapse is to modify the evolution of the `spatial' part of the wave function, which indirectly amounts to a change on the flavor components. In many respects, this phenomenon is similar to neutrino propagation through matter. For the analysis we use the mass proportional CSL model, and perform the calculation to second order perturbation theory. As we will show, the CSL prediction is very small - mainly due to the very small mass of neutrinos - and practically undetectable.