Chiral and flavor oscillations in quantum field theory

Abstract: Massive fermions produced through weak charged interactions possess a definite chirality, which is not conserved during free propagation, leading to chiral oscillations. Neutrinos also exhibit flavor oscillations. These phenomena have been extensively studied - both individually and within a unified framework - using the first quantization approach, but only separately in the context of quantum field theory. In this work, we address this gap by developing a quantum field theory treatment of flavor-chiral oscillations. Focusing on the case of two-flavor mixing, we compute the expectation values of the (non-conserved) chiral-flavor charges and recover the same oscillation formulas obtained in the first quantization formalism. These charges are diagonalized via Bogoliubov transformations in both the chiral and flavor sectors. Such transformations reveal a non-trivial structure of the chiral-flavor vacuum, which consists of a condensate of particles with definite masses and helicities.