Paper detail

A quantum field theoretical model of neutrino oscillation without external wave packets

We develop a general and consistent model of neutrino oscillation based on the quantum field theoretical description of the neutrino production and detection processes. Emphasis is placed on the locality of the interactions of these processes, where on top of the usual application of the four fermion local Hamiltonian, we assume that weak interactions switched on only when the wave functions of the particles involved are overlapping and switched off upon their separation. A key assumption in our treatment is that the wave packet sizes of the particles, in particular, the neutrino producing source particles and the neutrino absorbing detector particles, are taken to be negligible compared with their mean free path in their respective medium. With this assumption, and taking into considerations of the finite time of neutrino production, neutrino wave packets with well-defined edges are generated. This fact, together with the locality of weak interactions, enable us to relate the propagation time to the propagation distance, thus doing away with the ad hoc time averaging procedure normally employing in derivations of neutrino oscillation formula. No assumptions on the particular forms of particle wave functions; for example, Gaussians, need to be made. A good feature of our approach is that the neutrino oscillation formula is automatically normalised if the in-going states of the production and detection processes are normalised. We also show that causality and unitarity cannot both be satisfied in virtual neutrino models.