Flavor neutrinos as unstable particles

Abstract

In this paper we review flavor-energy uncertainty relations for neutrino oscillations in quantum field theory, putting in evidence the analogy with the case of unstable particles. Our study reveals that flavor neutrinos are intrinsically characterized by an energy distribution with a non-vanishing width. In the ultrarelativistic limit, the energy width is bounded from below by the inverse of the oscillation length, which plays the same role as the half-life for unstable particles.