Neutrino wave function and oscillation suppression

We consider a thought experiment, in which a neutrino is produced by an electron on a nucleus in a crystal. The wave function of the oscillating neutrino is calculated assuming that the electron is described by a wave packet. If the electron is relativistic and the spatial size of its wave packet is much larger than the size of the crystal cell, then the wave packet of the produced neutrino has essentially the same size as the wave packet of the electron. We investigate the suppression of neutrino oscillations at large distances caused by two mechanisms: (1) spatial separation of wave packets corresponding to different neutrino masses; (2) neutrino energy dispersion for given neutrino mass eigenstates. We resolve the contributions of these two mechanisms. Received: 26 July 2005, Published online: 6 October 2005