Gravitational Effects on Neutrino Decoherence in the Lense–Thirring Metric

Abstract

We analyze the effects of gravity on neutrino wave packet decoherence. As a specific example, we consider the gravitational field of a spinning spherical body described by the Lense–Thirring metric. By working in the weak-field limit and employing Gaussian wave packets, we show that the characteristic coherence length of neutrino oscillation processes is nontrivially affected, with the corrections being dependent on the mass and angular velocity of the gravity source. Possible experimental implications are finally discussed.

Keywords

• neutrino oscillations
• decoherence
• gravity
• Lense–Thirring metric
• wave packets