Neutrino Oscillations and Entanglement

Abstract

An improved treatment of neutrino oscillations follows when neutrino mass eigenstates and their associated recoiling particle states are entangled. When the neutrino and its recoil partner are treated as a single entangled quantum state the conservation of energy and momentum in neutrino oscillations can be assured, even in a plane-wave treatment. The oscillation wavelength between the neutrino and its associated recoil partner emerges as the fundamental periodicity in this analysis. However, the experimentally determined oscillation wavelength for neutrinos detected at some distance from a known source region is still in all cases given by the standard expression in current use.