Observability of spontaneous collapse in flavor oscillations and its relation to the CP and CPT symmetries

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spontaneous collapse models affect flavor oscillations in neutral mesons, especially considering CP violation, and assesses their observability with current experimental capabilities.

Contribution

It analyzes the impact of CP violation on spontaneous collapse effects in flavor oscillations, providing insights into their potential detectability in experiments.

Findings

CP violation modifies collapse-induced damping in meson oscillations

Current accelerator experiments are not sensitive enough to observe collapse effects

Theoretical analysis links collapse models with fundamental symmetries in particle physics

Abstract

Spontaneous collapse models aim at solving the measurement problem of quantum mechanics by introducing collapse of wave function as an ontologically objective mechanism that suppresses macroscopic superpositions. In particular, the strength of collapse depends on the mass of the system. Flavor oscillating systems such as neutral mesons feature superpositions of states of different masses and, hence, could be used to test the validity of spontaneous collapse models. Recently, it has been shown that the mass-proportional CSL model causes exponential damping of the neutral meson oscillations which, however, is not strong enough to be observed in the present accelerator facilities. In this Letter, we study how the violation of the $\mathcal{CP}$ symmetry in mixing changes the spontaneous collapse effect on flavor oscillations and its observability.