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Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which a neutrino created with a specific lepton family number ("lepton flavor": electron, muon, or tau) can later be measured to have a different lepton family number.
Before neutrinos were found to oscillate, they were generally assumed to be massless, propagating at the speed of light (c). According to the theory of special relativity , the question of neutrino velocity is closely related to their mass : If neutrinos are massless, they must travel at the speed of light, and if they have mass they cannot ...
Current experimental results indicate that neutrinos do indeed oscillate. These oscillations have a variety of possible implications, including the existence of neutrino masses, and the presence of several types of Lorentz violation. In the following, each category of Lorentz breaking is outlined. [5]
In particle physics, a lepton is an elementary particle of half-integer spin (spin 1 / 2 ) that does not undergo strong interactions. [1] Two main classes of leptons exist: charged leptons (also known as the electron-like leptons or muons), including the electron, muon, and tauon, and neutral leptons, better known as neutrinos.
The first scientific results of SNO were published on 18 June 2001, [7] [8] and presented the first clear evidence that neutrinos oscillate (i.e. that they can transmute into one another), as they travel from the Sun. This oscillation, in turn, implies that neutrinos have non-zero masses.
However, in 1968 Pontecorvo proposed that if neutrinos had mass, then they could change from one flavor to another. [8] Thus, the "missing" solar neutrinos could be electron neutrinos which changed into other flavors along the way to Earth, rendering them invisible to the detectors in the Homestake Mine and contemporary neutrino observatories.
The reason why such measurements are still conducted is connected with the theoretical possibility that significantly larger deviations from light speed might arise under certain circumstances. For instance, it was postulated that neutrinos might be some sort of superluminal particles called tachyons, [2] even though others criticized this ...
In particle physics, the Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata matrix (PMNS matrix), Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata matrix (MNS matrix), lepton mixing matrix, or neutrino mixing matrix is a unitary [a] mixing matrix that contains information on the mismatch of quantum states of neutrinos when they propagate freely and when they take part in weak interactions.