M\"ossbauer Antineutrinos: Recoilless Resonant Emission and Absorption of Electron Antineutrinos

Basic questions concerning phononless resonant capture of monoenergetic electron antineutrinos (M\"ossbauer antineutrinos) emitted in bound-state beta-decay in the 3H - 3He system are discussed. It is shown that lattice expansion and contraction after the transformation of the nucleus will drastically reduce the probability of phononless transitions and that various solid-state effects will cause large line broadening. As a possible alternative, the rare-earth system 163Ho - 163Dy is favoured. M\"ossbauer-antineutrino experiments could be used to gain new and deep insights into several basic problems in neutrino physics

Recoilless resonant neutrino experiment and origin of neutrino oscillations

We demonstrate that an experiment with recoilless resonant emission and absorption of tritium antineutrinos could have an important impact on our understanding of the origin of neutrino oscillations.Comment: The report at the Workshop on Next Generation Nucleon Decay and Neutrino Detectors, NNN06, September 21-23, 2006, University of Washington, Seattle, US

Mossbauer neutrinos in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory

We demonstrate the correspondence between quantum mechanical and quantum field theoretical descriptions of Mossbauer neutrino oscillations. First, we compute the combined rate $\Gamma$ of Mossbauer neutrino emission, propagation, and detection in quantum field theory, treating the neutrino as an internal line of a tree level Feynman diagram. We include explicitly the effect of homogeneous line broadening due to fluctuating electromagnetic fields in the source and detector crystals and show that the resulting formula for $\Gamma$ is identical to the one obtained previously (Akhmedov et al., arXiv:0802.2513) for the case of inhomogeneous line broadening. We then proceed to a quantum mechanical treatment of Mossbauer neutrinos and show that the oscillation, coherence, and resonance terms from the field theoretical result can be reproduced if the neutrino is described as a superposition of Lorentz-shaped wave packet with appropriately chosen energies and widths. On the other hand, the emission rate and the detection cross section, including localization and Lamb-Mossbauer terms, cannot be predicted in quantum mechanics and have to be put in by hand.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, 1 figure; v2: typos corrected; matches published versio

Fluorescence decay-time constants in organic liquid scintillators

The fluorescence decay-time constants have been measured for several scintillator mixtures based on phenyl-o-xylylethane (PXE) and linear alkylbenzene (LAB) solvents. The resulting values are of relevance for the physics performance of the proposed large-volume liquid scintillator detector LENA (Low Energy Neutrino Astronomy). In particular, the impact of the measured values to the search for proton decay via p -> K+ antineutrino is evaluated in this work.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure