On neutrino flavor states

Abstract

We review the issues associated with the construction of neutrino flavor states. We then provide a consistent proof that the flavor states are approximately well-defined only if neutrinos are ultra-relativistic or the mass differences are negligible compared to energy. However, we show that weak interactions can be consistently described by only neutrino mass eigenstates. Meanwhile, the second quantization of neutrino flavor fields generally has no physical relevance as their masses are indefinite. Therefore, the flavor states are not physical quantum states and they should simply be interpreted as definitions to denote specific linear combinations of mass eigenstates involved in weak interactions. We also briefly discuss the implication of this work for the mixing between active and heavy sterile neutrinos.