Decoherence effects on lepton number violation from heavy neutrino-antineutrino oscillations

Abstract

We study decoherence effects and phase corrections in heavy neutrino-antineutrino oscillations (NNOs), based on quantum field theory with external wave packets. Decoherence damps the oscillation pattern, making it harder to resolve experimentally. Additionally, it enhances lepton number violation (LNV) for processes in symmetry-protected low-scale seesaw models by reducing the destructive interference between mass eigenstates. We discuss a novel time-independent shift in the phase and derive formulae for calculating decoherence effects and the phase shift in the relevant regimes, which are the no dispersion regime and transverse dispersion regime. We find that the phase shift can be neglected in the parameter region under consideration since it is small apart from parameter regions with large damping. In the oscillation formulae, decoherence can be included by an effective damping parameter. We discuss this parameter and present averaged results, which apply to simulations of NNOs in the dilepton-dijet channel at the HL-LHC. We show that including decoherence effects can dramatically change the theoretical prediction for the ratio of LNV over LNC events.