21 July 2025 – We are very proud of Nadja Lessing, PhD student at the University of Valencia, who won a poster prize of the European Physical Society at the Majorana School 2025 in Modica, Sicily (Italy). Congratulations, Nadja!
In her poster she explained, on behalf of KM3NeT, the search for quantum decoherence in neutrino oscillations with the ARCA detector of KM3NeT. You can find the presentation of her poster at the website of the school.
She is also the primary author of a Collaboration paper about the search for quantum decoherence with ORCA, the smaller detector of KM3NeT. Our report about that paper can be found here.
Usually, neutrino oscillations are studied in the framework of quantum mechanics assuming that the neutrino system is isolated. Using the KM3NeT detectors, neutrino oscillations are studied in the framework of open quantum systems, where the neutrino is coupled to a larger environment. A neutrino that propagates in such an environment will experience changes to its quantum phase, which will lead to a loss of coherence of the neutrino mass eigenstates during propagation, affecting the neutrino oscillation patterns. The phenomenon is referred to as decoherence in neutrino oscillations. The search for decoherence in neutrino oscillations provides a rare opportunity to investigate quantum gravitational effects which are usually beyond the reach of current experiments.