Quantum witness and invasiveness of cosmic neutrino measurementsстатья
Статья опубликована в высокорейтинговом журнале
Информация о цитировании статьи получена из
Web of Science,
Scopus
Статья опубликована в журнале из списка Web of Science и/или Scopus
Дата последнего поиска статьи во внешних источниках: 9 апреля 2021 г.
Аннотация:Measurements of cosmic neutrinos have a reach potential for providing an insight into fundamental neutrino properties. For this a precise knowledge about an astrophysical environment of cosmic neutrinos propagation is needed. However this is not always possible, and the lack of information can bring about theoretical uncertainties in our physical interpretation of the results of experiments on cosmic neutrino fluxes. We formulate an approach that allows one to quantify the uncertainties using the apparatus of quantum measurement theory. We consider high-energy Dirac neutrinos emitted by some distant source and propagating towards Earth in the interstellar space.We take into account the neutrino magnetic moment interaction with stochastic interstellar magnetic fields and describe the neutrino evolution in the formalism of the Lindblad master equation for the neutrino density matrix. It is supposed that neutrinos on their way to Earth pass through highly magnetized dense layers of a cosmic object that “stops” left-handed neutrinos and lets only sterile, right-handed neutrinos to propagate farther. Such a filter mimics the strongest effect on the neutrino flux that can be induced by the cosmic object and that can be missed in the theoretical interpretation of the lab measurements due to the insufficient information about the astrophysical environment of the neutrino propagation. Treating the neutrino interaction with the neutrino filter of the cosmic object as the first, neutrino-spin measurement, whose result is not recorded, we study its invasive effect on the second, neutrino-flavor measurement in the lab. We quantify the invasiveness of the first, blind measurement by means of quantum witness that in the discussed case has an advantage over the well-known Leggett-Garg inequality, since the latter explores two-time correlation functions of the same operator. We solve analytically the Lindblad master equation for time evolution of the neutrino density matrix and on this basis we calculate the quantum witness for measuring cosmic electron neutrinos in the lab. We present numerical illustrations of the robust invasive effect showing that the quantum witness as a function of the distance between Earth and a cosmic object can be an asymptotically nonvanishing quantity despite the thermalization of the neutrino spin induced by stochastic interstellar magnetic fields.