Gravitational lensing of neutrinos through the lens of decoherence
Abstract
We propose a new source of neutrino decoherence arising from stochastic gravitational lensing by unresolved mass substructure. Unlike traditional models that treat the lensing potential as smooth and deterministic, we decompose the lensing potential into a smooth component and a stochastic population of compact clumps. The substructure induced fluctuations of the lensing potential generate stochastic corrections to the neutrino time delay, thereby producing random relative phases between different neutrino mass eigenstates. Averaging over the clump ensemble converts these phase fluctuations into an effective dampening of flavour coherence. This framework connects stochastic gravitational lensing with neutrino phenomenology and offers a novel route to probe dark matter substructure through astrophysical neutrino flavour transitions.
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BibTeX
@misc{acharya2026gravitational,
title = {{Gravitational lensing of neutrinos through the lens of decoherence}},
author = {Bikash Kumar Acharya and Ujjal Kumar Dey},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.18202},
eprint = {2609.18202},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18202},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Gravitational lensing of neutrinos through the lens of decoherence
AU - Bikash Kumar Acharya
AU - Ujjal Kumar Dey
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/16
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.18202
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18202
AB - We propose a new source of neutrino decoherence arising from stochastic gravitational lensing by unresolved mass substructure. Unlike traditional models that treat the lensing potential as smooth and deterministic, we decompose the lensing potential into a smooth component and a stochastic population of compact clumps. The substructure induced fluctuations of the lensing potential generate stochastic corrections to the neutrino time delay, thereby producing random relative phases between different neutrino mass eigenstates. Averaging over the clump ensemble converts these phase fluctuations into an effective dampening of flavour coherence. This framework connects stochastic gravitational lensing with neutrino phenomenology and offers a novel route to probe dark matter substructure through astrophysical neutrino flavour transitions.
ER -