Oscillations of Mossbauer neutrinos

Understand

We calculate the probability of recoilless emission and detection of neutrinos (Mossbauer effect with neutrinos) taking into account the boundedness of the parent and daughter nuclei in the neutrino source and detector as well as the leptonic mixing.

• We show that, in spite of their near monochromaticity, the recoillessly emitted and captured neutrinos oscillate.
• After a qualitative discussion of this issue, we corroborate and extend our results by computing the combined rate of $\bar{\nu}_e$ production, propagation and detection in the framework of quantum field theory, starting from first principles.
• This allows us to avoid making any a priori assumptions about the energy and momentum of the intermediate-state neutrino.