What causes neutrino oscillation?

What causes neutrino oscillation?

Neutrino oscillation arises from mixing between the flavor and mass eigenstates of neutrinos. This results in a changing superposition mixture of mass eigenstates as the neutrino travels; but a different mixture of mass eigenstates corresponds to a different mixture of flavor states.

What is the difference between an electron and a neutrino?

The difference between electron, proton and neutron is the charge they carry. Electrons are charged negative, protons are charged negative, and neutrons do not carry any charge. Rather they are neutral. Protons, electrons and neutrons are the subatomic particles that comprise atoms.

Why don’t they charge leptons oscillate?

However, this argument shows that there is symmetry between neutrinos and leptons, and that the only reason that lepton oscillation doesn’t happen and neutrino oscillation does is our definitions of e, µ, τ, νe, νμ, and ντ.

Why do neutrinos need mass to oscillate?

The 3 neutrino families (e, μ, τ) are usually called neutrino flavors. Neutrino flavor oscillation requires that the mass eigenstates of neutrinos are not equal and that the mass eigenstate is also not a flavor eigenstate.

Why does a neutron have no charge?

A neutron has no net charge because the charge of the quarks that make up the neutron balance each other out.

Why are most substances electrically neutral?

Atoms are electrically neutral because they have equal numbers of protons (positively charged) and electrons (negatively charged). If an atom gains or loses one or more electrons, it becomes an ion.

Do photons and neutrinos interact?

Since neutrinos do not carry electric charge, they don’t interact, directly, with photons. Neutrinos do carry weak charge-that’s how they interact directly with other particles and, thus, with photons. An electron-neutrino, for example, can emit a virtual electron and a virtual W boson.

Do electrons oscillate?

When bound in a stable state in an atom, an electron behaves mostly like an oscillating three-dimensional wave, i.e. the orbital vibrates. It’s a bit like a vibrating guitar string. When you let go, the elastic energy was converted to motional energy (kinetic energy) as the string snapped back and started vibrating.

How does neutrino oscillation work?

Neutrino oscillation occurs when neutrinos have mass and non-zero mixing. This is because the muon neutrinos passing through the earth turn into tau neutrinos. The discovery of neutrino oscillation verified that neutrinos have a small but finite mass.

What are neutrino oscillations?

Neutrino oscillations arise from a quantum mechanical phenomenon associated with the fact that the neutrinos have mass.

Why do neutrinos have different mass eigenstates?

This results in a changing superposition mixture of mass eigenstates as the neutrino travels; but a different mixture of mass eigenstates corresponds to a different mixture of flavor states. So a neutrino born as, say, an electron neutrino will be some mixture of electron, mu, and tau neutrino after traveling some distance.

How do the three neutrino states interact with each other?

That is, the three neutrino states that interact with the charged leptons in weak interactions are each a different superposition of the three (propagating) neutrino states of definite mass. Neutrinos are emitted and absorbed in weak processes in flavor eigenstates but travel as mass eigenstates.

What was the first experiment that detected neutrino oscillation?

The first experiment that detected the effects of neutrino oscillation was Ray Davis’s Homestake experiment in the late 1960s, in which he observed a deficit in the flux of solar neutrinos with respect to the prediction of the Standard Solar Model, using a chlorine-based detector.