Recent Developments in Neutrino Science: A Whole Lot About Almost Nothing

Results from Super-K, SNO, and KamLAND provide strong evidence that neutrinos undergo flavor-changing oscillations and therefore have non-zero mass. The v-disappearance observations by KamLAND, assuming CPT conservation, point to matter enhanced (MSW) oscillations with large mixing angles as the solution to the solar neutrino problem--a result consistent with the MSW parameters recently defined by these experiments. This requires that the observed neutrino flavors (e, μ, and tau) are not mass eigenstates, but are linear combinations of the mass eigenstates of the neutrino. However, such oscillation experiments can only determine the differences in the masses of the neutrinos, not the absolute scale of neutrino mass. What can be inferred from these experiments is that at least one species of neutrino has a mass greater than 55 meV. In fact, the WMAP observations of large-scale structure point to a sum-neutrino mass of ∼ 0.7 eV (roughly 0.25 eV/species assuming democracy between the flavors). Furthermore, there is still the important issue of whether the neutrino and anti-neutrino are distinct particles (i.e. Dirac type) or not (Majorana type). The only way to answer both of these questions is through neutrinoless double beta decay (DBD) experiments