Neutrino Oscillations in the Three Flavor Paradigm

Abstract

The three-flavor neutrino oscillation model describes the well-studied phenomenon of neutrinos produced in association with one charged lepton: electron, muon, or tau, and then later detected in association with a possibly different charged lepton. While somewhat surprising, the firm experimental discovery of the phenomenon in the late 1990s and early 2000s has lead to a revolution in particle physics as the nature of neutrinos has been explored with heightened vigor ever since. At the core of the phenomenon are the six neutrino oscillation parameters. These parameters are fundamental and not predicted from anything else in our model of particle physics. At the time of writing this chapter, many of them have been measured, but several key questions remain that are to be answered by neutrino oscillations themselves. These questions have motivated some of the largest and most involved particle physics experiments built to date. This chapter will develop the basics of neutrino oscillation theory and build intuition for the role of the oscillation parameters and how they are measured, as well as the important role of the matter effect in neutrino oscillations.