A Simple General Treatment of Flavor Oscillations

A unique description avoiding confusion is presented for all flavor-oscillation experiments in which particles of a definite flavor are emitted from a localized source. The probability for finding a particle with the wrong flavor must vanish at the position of the source for all times. This condition requires flavor-time and flavor-energy factorizations which determine uniquely the flavor mixture observed at a detector in the oscillation region; i.e. where the overlaps between the wave packets for different mass eigenstates differ negligibly from 100%. The translation of a “gedanken” experiments calculations (where measurement is perform in time) is done using the group velocity. Energy-momentum (frequency-wave number) and space-time descriptions are complementary, equally valid and give the same results. The two identical phase shifts obtained describe the same physics; adding them together to get a factor of two is double counting. Talk given by Harry J. Lipkin at the 18th annual MRST meeting, Toronto, May 9–10, 1996.