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Alec Aivazis renamed into-osc.tex to intro osc.tex
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\subsection{Neutrino Oscillations}\label{sect:osc-motiv}
In 1958, Bruno Pontecorvo, an assistant of Enrico Fermi, suggested that if neutrinos did in fact have a mass (unlike what Fermi claimed) then the neutrinos we encounter might be a particle mixture of more fundamental mass states. Consequently, Pontecorvo argued, there is some probability of transitioning between neutrino and its associated anti-neutrino. (CITE PONTECORVO PAPER Sov.Phys.JETP 7 (1958) 172-173 ). Around the same time, a variety of experiments reported similar discrepancies between the measured the measured number of neutrinos created in solar rays and what they expected.
Coupled with the discovery of the muon neutrino, Pontecorvo accredited this so-called "solar neutrino problem" to the oscillation of neutrinos between various flavor states due to a non zero mass. In 1967, he wrote that "from the point of view of detection possibilities ... if the oscillation length is much smaller than the radius of the solar region which effectively produces neutrinos ... it will be impossible to detect directly oscillations of the solar neutrino [with current technology]." He continues to say that "the only effect at the surface of the earth would consist in the fact that the flux of observable solar neutrinos would be half as large as the total flux of solar neutrinos" \cite{Pontecorvo_1968} . It was not until 1998 that the oscillation of neutrinos between various states was observed by the Super-Kamiokande Collaboration in Japan, giving substantial evidence to believe that neutrinos do in fact have a non-zero mass like Pontecorvo suggested 40 years earlier \cite{Fukuda_1998}.
