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Abstract:
We demonstrate the correspondence between quantum mechanical and quantum field theoretical descriptions of Mössbauer neutrino oscillations. First, we compute the combined rate $\Gamma$ of Mössbauer neutrino emission, propagation, and detection in quantum field theory, treating the neutrino as an internal line of a tree level Feynman diagram. We include explicitly the effect of homogeneous line broadening due to fluctuating electromagnetic fields in the source and detector crystals and show that the resulting formula for $\Gamma$ is identical to the one obtained previously (Akhmedov et al., arXiv:0802.2513) for the case of inhomogeneous line broadening. We then proceed to a quantum mechanical treatment of Mössbauer neutrinos and show that the oscillation, coherence, and resonance terms from the field theoretical result can be reproduced if the neutrino is described as a superposition of
Lorentz-shaped wave packet with appropriately chosen energies and widths. On the other hand, the emission rate and the detection cross section, including localization and Lamb-Mössbauer terms, cannot be predicted in quantum mechanics and have to be put in by hand.
