Seesaw, coherence and neutrino oscillations

Abstract

Abstract We present a prescription for consistently constructing non-Fock coherent flavour neutrino states within the framework of the seesaw mechanism, and establish that the physical vacuum of massive neutrinos is a condensate of Standard Model massless neutrino states. The coherent states, involving a finite number of massive states, are derived by constructing their creation operator. This construction fulfills automatically the key requirement of coherence for the oscillations of particles to occur. We comment on the inherent non-unitarity of the oscillation probability induced by the requirement of coherence.