Testing the wave packet approach to neutrino oscillations in future experiments

Abstract

When neutrinos propagate over long distances, the mass eigenstate components of a flavor eigenstate will become spatially separated due to their different group velocities. This can happen over terrestrial distance scales if the neutrino energy is of order MeV and if the neutrino is localized (in a quantum mechanical sense) to subatomic scales. For example, if the Heisenberg uncertainty in the neutrino position is below 0.01 Angstrom, neutrino decoherence can be observed in reactor neutrinos using a large liquid scintillator detector.