Wave packet treatment of neutrino flavor oscillations in various spacetimes

Abstract

We study the effect of gravity on neutrino flavor oscillations when each mass eigenstate is described by a wave packet instead of a plane wave. Two different approaches for implementing the wave packet formalism in the study of neutrino flavor oscillations in curved spacetime are examined. We work with a general static and spherically symmetric spacetime before applying our results to a few spacetime metrics of interest. We first focus on general relativity by examining the effect of the exterior and interior Schwarzschild solutions, as well as the de Sitter-Schwarzschild metric, and then we examine selected metrics from modified gravity models.