Space-time description of neutrino flavour oscillations

Abstract

Recently the issue of EPR-like correlations in the mutual probability of detecting neutrino together with accompanying charged lepton has received a new impetus. In this paper we describe this effect using the propagators of the particles involved in the Schwinger's parametric integral representation. We find this description more simple and more suitable to the purpose than the usual momentum-space analysis. We consider the cases of monochromatic neutrino source, wave packet source, and neutrino creation in a localised space-time region. In the latter case we note that the space-time oscillation amplitude depends on the values of the neutrino masses, and becomes rather small for large relative mass differences (mass hierarchy). We obtain the expressions for the oscillation and coherence lengths in various circumstances. In the region of overlap our results confirm those of Dolgov et al. [hep-ph/9703241].