Tuesday, July 2, 2024

A Different Take On Neutrino Oscillation

This paper suggests an attractive alternative interpretation of neutrino oscillation.

To account for neutrino oscillations, it is postulated that the neutrino has nonvanishing mass and each flavor eigenstate is formed by three distinct mass eigenstates, whose probability amplitudes interfere with each other during its propagation. 
However, I find that the energy conservation law requires these mass eigenstates, if they exist, to be entangled with distinct joint energy eigenstates of the other particles produced by the same weak interaction as the neutrino. This entanglement destroys the quantum coherence among the neutrino's mass eigenstates, which are responsible for flavor oscillations under the aforementioned postulation. 
I reveal that the neutrino oscillations actually originate from virtual excitation of the Z bosonic field diffusing over the space. During the propagation, the neutrino can continually excite and then immediately re-absorb a virtual Z boson. This virtual bosonic excitation produces a backaction on the neutrino, enabling it to oscillate among three flavors. When the neutrino propagates in matter, its behavior is determined by the competition between the coherent flavor transformation and decoherence effect resulting from scatterings.
Shi-Biao Zheng, "Neutrino oscillations originate from virtual excitation of Z bosons" arXiv:2407.00954 (July 1, 2024).

4 comments:

neo said...

so does the neutrino has nonvanishing mass from virtual excitation of Z bosons?

andrew said...

The paper doesn't make that claim, but it does seem possible.

neo said...

so does the neutrino has nonvanishing mass from virtual excitation of Z bosons make any testing predictions ?

neo said...

arXiv:2407.03465 [pdf, html, other]
Dark energy evolution from quantum gravity
Christof Wetterich
Comments: 15 pages, 9 figures
Subjects: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)

If an ultraviolet fixed point renders quantum gravity renormalizable, the effective potential for a singlet scalar field -- the cosmon -- can be computed according to the corresponding scaling solution of the renormalization group equations. We associate the largest intrinsic mass scale generated by the flow away from the fixed point with the scale of present dark energy density. This results in a highly predictive scenario for the evolution of dynamical dark energy. It solves the cosmological constant problem dynamically, and may be called "quantum gravity quintessence". A first setting without quantum scale symmetry violation in the neutrino sector could explain the present amount of dark energy, but fails for the constraints on its time evolution. In contrast, a logarithmic scale symmetry violation in the beyond standard model sector responsible for the neutrino masses induces a non-vanishing cosmon-neutrino coupling in the Einstein frame. This yields a cosmology similar to growing neutrino quintessence, which could be compatible with present observation. The small number of unknown parameters turns the scaling solution for quantum gravity into a fundamental explanation of dynamical dark energy which can be falsified.