Neutrinos Have Mass - So What?

Abstract

In this brief review, I discuss the new physics unveiled by neutrino oscillation experiments over the past several years, and discuss several attempts at understanding the mechanism behind neutrino masses and lepton mixing. It is fair to say that, while significant theoretical progress has been made, we are yet to construct a coherent picture that naturally explains non-zero, yet tiny, neutrino masses and the newly revealed, puzzling patterns of lepton mixing. I discuss what the challenges are, and point to the fact that more experimental input (from both neutrino and non-neutrino experiments) is dearly required - and that new data is expected to reveal, in the next several years, new information. Finally, I draw attention to the fact that neutrinos may have only just begun to reshape fundamental physics, given the fact that we are still to explain the LSND anomaly and because the neutrino oscillation phenomenon is ultimately sensitive to very small new-physics effects.

invited brief review, 15 pages, 1 eps figure, typo corrected, reference added

References in corpus (2)

• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (in "The Review of Particle Properties" 2004)
• Status of the CPT Violating Interpretations of the LSND Signal

Cited by in corpus (24)

• Measurement of electron antineutrino oscillation based on 1230 days of operation of the Daya Bay experiment
• A Survey of Lepton Number Violation Via Effective Operators
• Neutrino Phenomenology of Very Low-Energy Seesaws
• Pseudo-Dirac Neutrinos in the New Standard Model
• Neutrino Mass Hierarchy, Vacuum Oscillations, and Vanishing U_e3
• Minimal Mass Matrices for Dirac Neutrinos
• Seesaw Right Handed Neutrino as the Sterile Neutrino for LSND
• The Physical Range of Majorana Neutrino Mixing Parameters
• Nearly degenerate heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decay: mixing and oscillations
• The mass hierarchy with atmospheric neutrinos at INO
• Searching for sterile neutrinos from $\pi$ and $K$ decays
• A Three-Flavor, Lorentz-Violating Solution to the LSND Anomaly
• Short baseline neutrino oscillations: when entanglement suppresses coherence
• Low-Energy Neutrino Majorana Phases and Charged-Lepton Electric Dipole Moments
• Neutrino Mass Textures with Maximal CP Violation
• String-Inspired Triplet See-Saw from Diagonal Embedding of SU(2)_L in SU(2)_A x SU(2)_B
• Neutrino Oscillations, Entanglement and Coherence: A Quantum Field Theory Study In Real Time
• Space-time evolution of heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decays
• Dynamics of disentanglement, density matrix and coherence in neutrino oscillations
• Measurement of three-family neutrino mixing and search for CP violation
• Minimally Allowed Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay Rates Within an Anarchical Framework
• Minimally Allowed Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay Rates From Approximate Flavor Symmetries
• Detecting Neutrino Magnetic Moments with Conducting Loops
• CP nonconservation in the leptonic sector