Damping of neutrino oscillations, decoherence and the lengths of neutrino wave packets

Understand

Spatial separation of the wave packets (WPs) of neutrino mass eigenstates leads to decoherence and damping of neutrino oscillations.

• Damping can also be caused by finite energy resolution of neutrino detectors or, in the case of experiments with radioactive neutrino sources, by finite width of the emitted neutrino line.
• We study in detail these two types of damping effects using reactor neutrino experiments and experiments with radioactive $^{51}$Cr source as examples.
• We demonstrate that the effects of decoherence by WP separation can always be incorporated into a modification of the energy resolution function of the detector and so are intimately entangled with it.