Effective propagators of flavor neutrinos

Abstract

We analyze the possibility to construct propagators of flavor neutrinos, which are particles with indefinite masses. This kind of propagators was used previously while studying neutrino flavor oscillations in frames of the quantum field theory (QFT) based approach. Starting with the operator and the path integral formulations of the QFT, we obtain that the naive derivation of propagators for flavor neutrinos violates the basic principles of the QFT. Nevertheless, we can still construct the effective propagator of flavor neutrinos considering the mass mixing term as a perturbation. In this situation, the effective propagator arises from the solution of a Dyson-like equation. We use the derived effective propagator to rederive the quantum mechanical transition probability for neutrino oscillations in vacuum in frames of the QFT. The application of the obtained results to neutrino oscillations in background matter is also considered.