Neutrino oscillations in a stochastic model for space-time foam

Abstract

We study decoherence models for flavour oscillations in four-dimensional stochastically fluctuating space times and discuss briefly the sensitivity of current neutrino experiments to such models. We pay emphasis on demonstrating the model dependence of the associated decoherence-induced damping coefficients in front of the oscillatory terms in the respective transition probabilities between flavours. Within the context of specific models of foam, involving point-like D-branes and leading to decoherence-induced damping which is inversely proportional to the neutrino energies, we also argue that future limits on the relevant decoherence parameters coming from TeV astrophysical neutrinos, to be observed in ICE-CUBE, are not far from theoretically expected values with Planck mass suppression. Ultra high energy neutrinos from Gamma Ray Bursts at cosmological distances can also exhibit in principle sensitivity to such effects.