2009/07/16 by Charis Anastopoulos, C. Anastopoulos, Ntina Savvidou +3
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #hep-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0907.2878
4 pages,revtex
arxiv created 2009/07/16 · openalex publication_date 2009/07/16 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A fundamental principle of quantum theory, clearly manifested in the two-slit experiment, is that for any alternatives that cannot be distinguished by measurement physical predictions are obtained by summation of their amplitudes. In particle oscillation experiments, a particle's time of detection is not directly measured, consequently, the detection probability should involve the summation over amplitudes corresponding to different detection times. However, in contrast to the principle above, standard treatments involve summation over probabilities rather than amplitudes; this implicitly assumes the existence of a decohering mechanism. In this work, we construct the detection probabilities for particle oscillations by summation over amplitudes, corresponding to different detection times. The resulting wavelength of particle oscillations differs from the standard expression by a factor of two. Moreover, we predict a dependence of the oscillation wavelength on the threshold of the decay process used for detection.