Exploring the nature of neutrinos in a dissipative environment

TL;DR

This paper investigates how environmental decoherence affects neutrino oscillation probabilities and the potential to distinguish between Dirac and Majorana neutrinos in long-baseline experiments.

Contribution

It introduces an open quantum system approach to analyze neutrino oscillations considering dissipation and explores the impact on identifying neutrino nature.

Findings

Decoherence influences neutrino transition probabilities.

Majorana phase effects are observable under dissipative conditions.

Sensitivity studies for various experiments to distinguish neutrino types.

Abstract

In this study, we explore the scope of determining the neutrino nature in long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments considering the effect of environmental decoherence in neutrino evolution. Assuming an open quantum system framework, we numerically analyze the two flavor neutrino oscillation probabilities. We observe that the transition probabilities accommodate the Majorana phase in the presence of dissipative environment. Considering this phenomenology, we study the effect of Majorana phase on these probabilities and investigate the sensitivity of T2K, ESSnuSB, NOvA, T2HKK and DUNE to differentiate between Dirac and Majorana neutrinos.