Maximal correlation between flavor entanglement and oscillation damping due to localization effects

Abstract

Localization effects and quantum decoherence driven by the mass-eigenstate wave packet propagation are shown to support a statistical correlation between quantum entanglement and damped oscillations in the scenario of three-flavor quantum mixing for neutrinos. Once the mass-eigenstates that support flavor oscillations are identified as three-{\em qubit} modes, a decoherence scale can be extracted from correlation quantifiers, namely the entanglement of formation and the logarithmic negativity. Such a decoherence scale is compared with the coherence length of damped oscillations. Damping signatures exhibited by flavor transition probabilities as an effective averaging of the oscillating terms are then explained as owing to loss of entanglement between mass modes involved in the relativistic propagation.