Gravitational effects on neutrino decoherence in Lense-Thirring metric

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gravitational fields, specifically the Lense-Thirring metric, influence neutrino wave packet decoherence, revealing that gravity can modify the coherence length in neutrino oscillations with potential experimental consequences.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of gravitational effects on neutrino decoherence using the Lense-Thirring metric in the weak-field limit, highlighting the dependence on source mass and angular velocity.

Findings

Gravity affects neutrino coherence length.

Corrections depend on source mass and angular velocity.

Potential experimental implications discussed.

Abstract

We analyze gravity effects on neutrino wave packet decoherence. As a specific example, we consider the gravitational field of a spinning spherical body described by the Lense-Thirring metric. By working in the weak-field limit and employing Gaussian wave packets, we show that the characteristic coherence length of neutrino oscillation processes is nontrivially affected, the corrections being dependent on the mass and angular velocity of the gravity source. Possible experimental implications are finally discussed.