Impact of Antiparticle Degrees of Freedom on Neutrino Flavor Oscillations in Frames of Quantum Field Theory

Abstract We study neutrino flavor oscillations using the approach based on the quantum field theory (QFT), where neutrinos are taken to be virtual particles. One deals with the propagators of neutrino mass eigenstates in this formalism. Previously, while applying this approach to neutrino oscillations in external fields, we decomposed the propagators and used only the particle contribution in the calculation of the matrix element. In the present work, we carefully justify the validity of this kind of transformation by considering neutrino oscillations in vacuum. In principle, the results obtained can be extended for the QFT applied to neutrino oscillations in external fields.