Seminario. Giuseppe Gaetano Luciano (Univ. Lleida)

"Neutrino mixing beyond Pontecorvo theory, entangled vacuum and all of that!"

Speaker: Giuseppe Gaetano Luciano

(Univ. Lleida)

Abstract: Neutrino mixing is one of the most fascinating yet least understood phenomena in particle physics. The phenomenological theory of neutrino oscillations in Quantum Mechanics is based on the pioneer works by Pontecorvo, which describe neutrino flavor states as linear superpositions of the mass eigenstates. However, this description fails to catch the essential features of Quantum Field Theory, where the Fock space of flavor states turns out to be unitarily inequivalent to that of mass states (inequivalent vacua model). Therefore, the question arises as to what the true physical representation of neutrinos is. In this talk, we discuss recent advances within the field theoretical framework of neutrinos. It is shown that mixing transformations in QFT arise as a consequence of the non-trivial interplay between rotations and Bogoliubov transformations, with the latter responsible for the entangled condensate structure of the flavor vacuum and the emerging orthogonality with the mass vacuum. As a physical testing ground, we apply the above formalism to the decay of uniformly accelerated protons in the Standard Model. We argue that the only neutrino representation consistent with: i) the conservation of lepton charge in the production/detection vertices, ii) the General Covariance of QFT and iii) the prediction of CP violation in neutrino oscillations is the flavor Hilbert space.

Fecha: miércoles, 8 de mayo de 2024
Hora: 12:10 horas
Lugar: Facultad de Ciencias. Edificio A. Aula 11