What is coherent in neutrino oscillations

Abstract

Simple rigorous quantum mechanics with no hand waving nor loopholes clarifies the confusion between three contradictory descriptions of neutrino oscillations: (1)The time oscillations shown in standard textbooks produced by neutrino eigenstates with different masses and different energies. (2) That time oscillations and interference between states having different energies cannot be observed in realistic experiments. (3) That interference between different neutrino mass eigenstates is not observable in "missing mass" experiments where information determining the neutrino mass is available from other particles measured in production or detection vertices. Quantum-mechanical ignorance of the neutrino momentum is rigorously shown to be imposed by all realistic detectors and to produce coherence between amplitudes from neutrino states with the same energy and different masses. Conditions are precisely formulated for the loss of coherence when mass eigenstate wave packets moving with different velocities separate. The example of Bragg scattering shows how quantum-mechanically imposed ignorance produces coherence.