On particle oscillations

Abstract

It has been firmly established that neutrinos change their flavour during propagation. This feature is attributed to the feature that each flavour eigenstate is a superposition of three mass eigenstates, which propagate with different frequencies. This picture, although widely accepted, is wrong in the simplest approach and requires quite sophisticated treatment based on the wave-packet description within quantum field theory. In this communication we present a novel, much simpler explanation and show that oscillations among massive particles can be obtained in a natural way. We use the framework of quantum mechanics with time being a physical observable, not just a parameter. © 2014 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.