Decoherence in neutrino oscillations, neutrino nature and CPT violation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how decoherence affects neutrino oscillations, revealing that Majorana neutrinos can violate CP and T symmetries under certain conditions, unlike Dirac neutrinos, with implications for experimental detection.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Majorana neutrinos can violate CP and T symmetries due to off-diagonal decoherence terms, and shows how oscillation formulas depend on the mixing matrix choice.

Findings

Majorana neutrinos can violate CP and T symmetry with decoherence.

Oscillation formulas vary with the choice of mixing matrix U.

Potential to distinguish Dirac and Majorana neutrinos experimentally.

Abstract

We analyze many aspects of the phenomenon of the decoherence for neutrinos propagating in long baseline experiments. We show that, in the presence of an off-diagonal term in the dissipative matrix, the Majorana neutrino can violate the CP T symmetry, which, on the contrary, is preserved for Dirac neutrinos. We show that oscillation formulas for Majorana neutrinos depend on the choice of the mixing matrix U. Indeed, different choices of U lead to different oscillation formulas. Moreover, we study the possibility to reveal the differences between Dirac and Majorana neutrinos in the oscillations. We use the present values of the experimental parameters in order to relate our theoretical proposal with experiments.