Neutrino oscillations in Unruh radiation

Abstract

The study of the decay of an accelerated proton recently provided a “theoretical proof” of the Unruh effect. On the basis of general covariance of Quantum Field Theory, indeed, it was found that the decay rates in the inertial and comoving frames do coincide only when the thermal nature of the accelerated vacuum is taken into account. Such an analysis was then extended to the case with mixed neutrinos. In this paper, we show that, by further embedding neutrino oscillations in the above framework, the requirement of general covariance necessarily entails the use of flavor neutrinos as asymptotic states, as well as the occurrence of neutrino oscillations in the Unruh thermal bath.