3 ms·

>only one type of neutrino can be massless they would stuck in that type then right? which is not what we see in mid - long baseline experiments, so I think al

• SaberTail 5y ago
  We can only produce neutrinos as pure flavor states. These are all mixtures of the mass states.
• antognini 5y ago
  No, the oscillations only depend on the difference between the squares of the masses. The fact that oscillations between the different flavors is observed just implies that the differences between the masses are all nonzero.
  • addaon 5y ago
    But wouldn't a zero-mass neutrino travel at c, and thus not experience time, and thus not be able to decay?
    • antognini 5y ago
      It's true that a zero mass neutrino would travel at c (just like any massless particle). But neutrino oscillations are not decays. It's more that the neutrino propagates as a mixture of eigenstates. There's nothing stopping one of these eigenstates from having zero mass (as far as we know). As an analogy, you could think of a photon with circular polarization traveling through a vacuum. If you measured its linear polarization you would sometimes find that it is up-down and other times left-right. The photon is massless but is still able to oscillate between these two linear polarizations because it is propagating with a mixture of these two polarizations.