By Fumihiko Suekane
Springer
Also available at the CERN bookshop
This is a detailed and up-to-date textbook on neutrino oscillations. After a short historical introduction (chapter 1), chapter 2 contains a concise, yet quite complete, presentation of neutrino theory in the Standard Model, including neutrino interactions and production in pion, muon and nuclear beta decay. The basic ideas of particle oscillation in quantum mechanics are introduced in chapter 3, and a detailed theory of neutrino oscillations is presented in chapter 4 – first in a two-neutrino approximation, then generalised to the three neutrino flavours – for oscillations both in vacuum and matter. In addition to the usual neutrino description in terms of plane waves, this chapter includes the mathematical treatment of a wave-packet oscillation, which helps in understanding neutrino oscillations over astronomical distances.
Chapter 5 contains a description of past and present oscillation experiments and of the results published prior to 2014, including the measurement of θ13. These results are again summarised in chapter 6, where the current knowledge of three-neutrino oscillation parameters is described. Future experiments to measure the remaining oscillation parameters (the so-called neutrino mass hierarchy and the CP-violation phase) are discussed in chapter 7, together with oscillation anomalies observed by a number of experiments (LSND, MiniBoone, Gallium and recent re-analyses of old reactor experiments). These anomalies, if confirmed, would imply the existence of at least one additional “sterile” neutrino with a mass in the order of 1 eV, requiring a mixing matrix of larger dimensions and more oscillation parameters. Chapter 7 also includes a discussion of the difference between Dirac and Majorana neutrinos, and the implications of direct measurements of the effective νe mass and of searches for neutrinoless double beta decay. Finally, chapter 8 contains a useful appendix summarising all the symbols, abbreviations and formulae used in the book.
The textbook contains all of the information that anybody interested in neutrino oscillations would like to know. Physicists involved in neutrino experiments should each have a copy in their private libraries.
