Theory of neutrino oscillations with entanglement

We show that, despite appearances, a theoretical approach to neutrino oscillation in which the neutrino and its interaction partners are entangled yields the standard result for the neutrino oscillation wavelength. We also shed some light on the question of why plane-wave approaches to the neutrino oscillation problem can yield the correct oscillation wavelength even though they do not explicitly account for the localization of the neutrino source and the detector.

Figure 1

The Feynman diagram of neutrino oscillations. $P$ and $R$ are the parent particle and the recoil, respectively, while $T$ is the target atom at the detector and $S$ denotes the outgoing “signal” particles.