Covariant treatment of neutrino oscillations

Abstract

We perform a covariant wavepacket analysis of neutrino oscillations taking into account the lifetime of the neutrino production process . We find that flavour oscillations in space are washed out when the neutrinos are produced from long lived resonances - and what may be observed in appearance/disappearance experiments is a uniform conversion probability independent of distance. The lifetime of the resonance which produces the neutrinos acts as the the effective baseline of the experiment. For this reason the LSND experiment where neutrinos are produced from muon decay has two orders of magnitude more sensitivity to neutrino mass square difference than other experiments where the neutrinos are produced from pion or kaon decays.We also show that there are no EPR type oscillations of the secondary decay particles.