| In recent years, there have been spectacular developments in determining the elements of neutrino flavor mixing via the very general phenomenon of neutrino oscillations. Of the three neutrinos nu e, numu, nutau, nu e's from the sun oscillate predominantly to numu's with a large mixing angle theta12 around 35° while the atmospheric neutrinos numu oscillate predominantly to nutau's with a large mixing angle theta23 around 45°. There is very little experimental information on the remaining mixing angle theta 13. Present data indicates that it is small, around a few degrees, and can very well be zero! The present work investigates a simple scheme of neutrino flavor mixing---a Wolfenstein's type of scheme---first developed for understanding quark flavor mixing that provides an elegant explanation to the observed phenomenon. I start with a three by three matrix for neutrino flavor mixing in which the nine matrix elements of the mixing matrix are determined in terms of just four parameters that are referred to as lambda, A, rho and eta. By relating the various mixing elements with the ones that are probed in neutrino oscillation experiments, I derive constraints on the the paramenters lambda, A, rho and eta. The present scheme serves as a useful pneumonic for carrying all the information on neutrinos flavor mixing on ones fingertips, information that is easily reproduced without having to resort to complicated tables of information on mixing angles describing neutrino flavor mixing. I hope this scheme will be useful in analyzing future data on neutrino physics.;... |
