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Concept
Neutrino oscillation
Summary
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. The probability of measuring a particular flavor for a neutrino varies between three known states, as it propagates through space.
First predicted by Bruno Pontecorvo in 1957, neutrino oscillation has since been observed by a multitude of experiments in several different contexts. Most notably, the existence of neutrino oscillation resolved the long-standing solar neutrino problem.
Neutrino oscillation is of great theoretical and experimental interest, as the precise properties of the process can shed light on several properties of the neutrino. In particular, it implies that the neutrino has a non-zero mass, which requires a modification to the Standard Model of particle physics. The experimental discovery of neutrino oscillation, and thus neutrino mass, by the Super-Kamiokande Observatory and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatories was recognized with the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics.
A great deal of evidence for neutrino oscillation has been collected from many sources, over a wide range of neutrino energies and with many different detector technologies. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for their early pioneering observations of these oscillations.
Neutrino oscillation is a function of the ratio , where L is the distance traveled and E is the neutrino's energy. (Details in below.) All available neutrino sources produce a range of energies, and oscillation is measured at a fixed distance for neutrinos of varying energy. The limiting factor in measurements is the accuracy with which the energy of each observed neutrino can be measured. Because current detectors have energy uncertainties of a few percent, it is satisfactory to know the distance to within 1%.
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In particle physics, lepton number (historically also called lepton charge) is a conserved quantum number representing the difference between the number of leptons and the number of antileptons in an elementary particle reaction. Lepton number is an additive quantum number, so its sum is preserved in interactions (as opposed to multiplicative quantum numbers such as parity, where the product is preserved instead). The lepton number is defined by where is the number of leptons and is the number of antileptons.
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In the theory of grand unification of particle physics, and, in particular, in theories of neutrino masses and neutrino oscillation, the seesaw mechanism is a generic model used to understand the relative sizes of observed neutrino masses, of the order of eV, compared to those of quarks and charged leptons, which are millions of times heavier. The name of the seesaw mechanism was given by Tsutomu Yanagida in a Tokyo conference in 1981. There are several types of models, each extending the Standard Model.