massless neutrinos oscillating in flavor

[lcwelch]

I present some work showing that neutrinos don't gave to have mass to oscillate in flavor... http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08339v1.pdf

[Ben6993]

I read and liked your paper, as best I could given my limited knowledge, with interest.
Also looked at your earlier arxiv (minor note: 'arXic' typo on page 13) paper on quarks.
Further noted your online queries in physics forums in 2009 about the Majorana mass being somehow mysteriously different to a Dirac mass to which I didn't find an online answer that helped me. [Well, except that I don't believe in neutrinos being their own antiparticle, but noted in that online strand that they could be their own antiparticle in a Majorana basis but still be different in a Dirac basis? Which is help of a kind.]

In your quark paper you note in the conclusions : "The naturalness of associating ”color” with the three imaginary bases of quaternions".
However, in your present paper you seem to be associating the imaginary bases with families of neutrinos. Is that correct? And if so is that not two different associations with the bases? And colour is independent of family? [Extract from page 4: "where an association has been explicitly been made between the lepton flavors and the imaginary bases of quaternions".]

I have a simple, non-mathematical, legolike model for particles and in my model the sterile neutrino could exist in families, just like the non-sterile neutrinos. So in your model there could only be one flavour of sterile neutrino? Also my model uses 'weak isospin'. Does that have a place in your model? In my model, neutrinos also do not need to have mass in order to oscillate, though 'oscillate' in my model has nothing to do with superposition and more to do with particle interactions between neutrinos and higgs en route from say the sun to earth.

[lcwelch]

Thanks for the typo find. The quark paper involved massive particles whereas the neutrino involved massless ones. So where do the leptons themselves go? (they have mass) I'm still thinking about this. Why are quarks different from leptons? Both have spin 1/2 etc. The experimental difference, of course, is that quarks "feel" the strong force whereas leptons don't. Can that difference be mathematically expressed in a model so the quaternion degree of freedom is expressed as "flavor" in leptons and as "color" in quarks?

Yes, I have only one sterile neutrino. I have not considered isospin. Thanks for your interest and comments.

[Ben6993]

I see electrons, quarks and neutrinos as all needing the quaternion degrees of freedom for colour, as in your quark paper.
But only the quarks have an asymmetry of colour, whereas the electrons and neutrinos each have an equal amount of R, G and B.

IMO the difference between a quark and an electron is merely one of tossing six dice to determine their six coloured 'socks' contents.
(for each die, let face 1 = R, 2 = G, 3 = B, 4 = R', 5 = G', 6 = B')
See my blog page 'Electric charge and coloured socks' at http://wp.me/p18gTT-4k
An electron has (R G B) (R G B)
A red up has (R' G' B') R G' B'
A red down has (R G B) R G' B'
where R, B and B each has electric charge -1/6 and R', G' and B' each has electric charge +1/6.
In my model there is a direct relationship between electric charge and sock colour tone: negative charge for coloured socks and positive charge for anticoloured socks. This relationship between electric charge and colour is confounded/obscured for quark colours.
{A neutrino has (R G B) (R' G' B') .}

So how do you distinguish between generations?
In my model a red charm quark has (R' G' B') R G' B' (R G B) (R' G' B') (R G B) (R' G' B')
and a top quark contains an even bigger quantity of socks.
A muon has (R G B) (R G B) (R G B) (R' G' B') (R G B) (R' G' B')
I used this method of adding overall neutral blocks of socks to get higher generations to aim to preserve physical similarities between different generations. Though it is probable that having so many socks available in the higher generations could change their net colour properties.

[Ben6993]

Hello lcwelch

I hope that I have not irked you by flaunting my non-mathematical ideas in my previous post. No offence intended.

By way of explanation, late last year I finalised (famous last words!) my non-mathematical legolike model of elementary particles in two vixra papers. Being very tired by that, I am taking a break until Easter after which I hope to try to make the model more mathematical. To do that I have for some years been following online mathematical physics courses by Susskind and also am now looking for interesting relevant papers which I can maybe use. So I was looking at your paper with my own purpose in mind. I am a mathematician/statistician, although maybe not yet a good enough one for this task, and I thought it was better to try to get my own model right non-mathematically first.

I certainly like very much your use of quaternion bases for use as colour dimensions. As the sterile neutrino is a right-handed version of the neutrino, I think it must come in at least three generations just like the three left-handed neutrinos, so I don't see that as fitting on just one dimension. The longer I use this website, the less I trust QM. QM seems to me to be a statistical framework, whereas I believe in the deterministic hidden variables. Statistically, the neutrino has no net colour, yet in my model that is only because all the colours and anticolours cancel each other. So I would say that the neutrino [with or without mass] still needs to be modeled with colour dimensions.

I am not arguing against using quaternion bases as a useful mathematical tool for distinguishing different families, it is just that I don't see different families as actually being physically orthogonal to one another.

[lcwelch]

I think in mathematical terms. Note in my paper I start with Dirac's equation and see what the implications are - but I think physics is subject to math. Another matter to remember (for both of us) is that a new explanation of what is known - no matter how elegant the new explanation is - is not very exciting to the physics world. Making a new prediction that can be experimentally verified is essential for progress. My mathematical model - and that is all it is, a model - says that there is one sterile neutrino. I can't force it to give me what is not there. A different model will give, perhaps, different results, but that different model has to be consistent with what is known and that's not easy.

[Ben6993]

Hi

I agree entirely with your post wrt judgement by experimental verification (eg of the number of sterile neutrinos) and sincerely wish you well with your interesting 'neutrino' paper.