Neutrino Oscillations
Neutrino Oscillations
Experiments show that neutrinos initially created with a definite flavor (electron, muon, or tau) can be found with a different flavor after they travel far from the source. This is caused by neutrino oscillation. In the language of quantum physics, the states representing the three types of flavor do not have definite mass. Each of the mass eigenstates is a linear combination of the flavor states. The oscillation phenomenon depends on the parameters of the model, namely the mass differences of the mass eigenstates and the mixing parameters, from which the coefficients of the linear combination can be calculated. The plots show the probability of finding a 1 GeV neutrino in the different flavors as a function of the distance between the source and the detector. The fourth figure demonstrates the hierarchy of the neutrino masses and the flavor coefficients in each eigenstate.