Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2022) 137: 488
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02717-4

Regular Article

Quantum coherence in neutrino oscillation in matter

¹ Department of Physics, Islamic Azad University North Tehran Branch, 165115-3311, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
² Department of Physics, University of Qom, Ghadir Blvd., 371614-6611, Qom, Islamic Republic of Iran

^b mettefaghi@qom.ac.ir

Received: 30 October 2021
Accepted: 12 April 2022
Published online: 20 April 2022

Abstract

A closer and more detailed study of neutrino oscillation, in addition to assisting us in founding physics beyond the standard model, can potentially be used to understand the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. In particular, we know that the neutrino oscillation occurs because the quantum states of the produced and detected neutrinos are a coherent superposition of the mass eigenstates, and this coherency is maintained during the propagation due to the small mass difference of neutrinos. In this paper, we consider the decoherence due to the neutrino interaction in the material medium with constant density in addition to the decoherence coming from the localization properties. For this purpose, we use in order to quantify the coherence and investigate its dependence on the matter density. According to our results, in general, the coherence in material medium is less than vacuum. However, there exist exceptions; for some matter densities, the localization coherence lengths become infinite. So, for these cases, in matter is more than the vacuum.