Seesaw, coherence and neutrino oscillations

Abstract

We present a prescription for consistently constructing non-Fock coherent flavour neutrino states within the framework of the seesaw mechanism, and establish that the physical vacuum of massive neutrinos is a condensate of Standard Model massless neutrino states. The coherent states, involving a finite number of massive states, are derived by constructing their creation operator. Such a construction is the key requirement so that the oscillations of particles indeed occur. We comment on the inherent non-unitarity of the oscillation probability induced by the requirement of coherence.

Comments: 27 pages; clarifications and references added