Flavor neutrino states for pedestrians

Understand

In this paper we discuss the ontology of flavor states of oscillating neutrinos.

• While an heuristic approach to this subject, experimentally successful in the high energy regime, is generally adopted, a logically consistent definition of flavor states describing neutrinos produced and detected in weak processes is still desirable and essential from a theoretical perspective.
• Here we briefly review basic facts and present some arguments which suggest that the definition of flavor states as eigenstates of flavor charges is the most reasonable one.