KM3NeT Sensitivity to Decoherence in Neutrino Oscillations

• Main Author: Nadja Lessing
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2022
• Subjects: Orca
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6781033

Quantum decoherence of neutrino states is an effect that is proposed in different theories of quantum gravity. It is envisaged to emerge from interactions of the neutrino as a quantum system with the environment and may destroy the superposition of neutrino mass states, leading to modified probabilities of neutrino oscillations in various ways. Therefore, neutrino telescopes such as KM3NeT/ORCA and KM3NeT/ARCA, that are sensitive to different neutrino flavours and to oscillations in a wide range of neutrino energies, can ideally probe this effect. ORCA and ARCA are water Cherenkov detectors that are currently under construction in the Mediterranean Sea. While ARCA is primarily designed to detect high energy cosmic neutrinos, ORCA aims at the precise measurement of atmospheric neutrino oscillations. This contribution reports on the decoherence sensitivity for both detectors using a phenomenological model in a three-family framework including matter effects. Additionally, the sensitivity of ORCA with 6 detection units is presented, since for this configuration data are already available. It is shown that, for certain energy dependencies of the decoherence phenomenon, even ORCA with 6 detection units is capable of improving current bounds on the strength of decoherence effects.