Quantum flavor oscillations extended to the Dirac theory

Understand

This report deals with the quantum theory of flavor oscillations in vacuum, extended to fermionic particles in the several subtle aspects of the first and second quantization theories.

• In this scenario, the use of the Dirac equation is required for a satisfactory evolution of fermionic mass-eigenstates since in the standard treatment of oscillations the mass-eigenstates are implicitly assumed to be scalars and, consequently, the spinorial form of neutrino wave functions is not included in the calculations.
• Within first quantized theories, besides flavor oscillations, chiral oscillations automatically appear when we set the dynamic equations for a fermionic Dirac-type particle.
• The left-handed chiral nature of created and detected neutrinos can be implemented in the first quantized Dirac theory in presence of mixing; the probability loss due to the changing of initially left-handed neutrinos to the undetected right-handed neutrinos can be obtained in analytic form.