It has been speculated that quantum gravity might induce a foamy space-time structure at small scales, randomly perturbing the propagation phases of free-streaming particles (such as kaons, neutrons, or neutrinos). Particle interferometry might then
reveal non-standard decoherence effects, in addition to standard ones (due to, e.g., finite source size and detector resolution.) In this work we discuss the phenomenology of such non-standard effects in the propagation of electron neutrinos in the Sun and in the long-baseline reactor experiment KamLAND, which jointly provide us with the best available probes of decoherence at neutrino energies E ~ few MeV. In the solar neutrino case, by means of a perturbative approach, decoherence is shown to modify the standard (adiabatic) propagation in matter through a calculable damping factor. By assuming a power-law dependence of decoherence effects in the energy domain (E^n with n = 0,+/-1,+/-2), theoretical predictions for two-family neutrino mixing are compared with the data and discussed. We find that neither solar nor KamLAND data show evidence in favor of non-standard decoherence effects, whose characteristic parameter gamma_0 can thus be significantly constrained. In the Lorentz-invariant case n=-1, we obtain the upper limit gamma_0<0.78 x 10^-26 GeV at 95% C.L. In the specific case n=-2, the constraints can also be interpreted as bounds on possible matter density fluctuations in the Sun, which we improve by a factor of ~ 2 with respect to previous analyses.
In a previous paper [1], we presented a three-flavour oscillation analysis of the solar neutrino measurements and of the first data from the KamLAND experiment, in terms of the relevant mass-mixing parameters (delta m^2, theta_12, theta_13). The anal
ysis, performed by including the terrestrial neutrino constraints coming from the CHOOZ (reactor), KEK-to-Kamioka (K2K, accelerator) and Super-Kamiokande (SK, atmospheric) experiments, provided a stringent upper limit on theta_13, namely, sin^2(theta_13)<0.05 at 3 sigma. We reexamine such upper bound in the light of a recent (although preliminary) reanalysis of atmospheric neutrino data performed by the SK collaboration, which seems to shift the preferred value of the largest neutrino square mass difference Delta m^2 downwards. By taking the results of the SK official reanalysis at face value, and by repeating the analysis in [1] with such a new input, we find that the upper bound on theta_{13} is somewhat relaxed: sin^2(theta_13)<0.067 at 3 sigma. Related phenomenological issues are briefly discussed.
