Neutrino Mistakes: Wrong tracks and Hints, Hopes and Failures

Abstract

In the last two decades, the field of neutrino physics has made enormous progress in measuring the strength and frequency of neutrino and antineutrino oscillations. Along the way, there have been many instances of misunderstanding which led to wrong measurements or speculation for new features of neutrino physics that are not now accepted as correct. This is part of the natural process of science, but given the well-accepted notion that we learn from our mistakes, it is worthwhile to look at some examples and see what the lessons might be. With that goal in mind, I have a list of results which might be termed neutrino mistakes, with the fact in mind that there is no well-accepted definition of a mistake, and no unique threshold for counting something as a mistake when you change your mind after you obtain more information. After making the list, I chose seven of them to discuss. No clear conclusions were drawn from this exercise, but some interesting issues regarding putative wrong results are discussed.

Flavor structures of charged fermions and massive neutrinos

“…So far the Daya Bay experiment has reported the most accurate measurement: sin 2 2θ 13 = 0.0856 ± 0.0029 [380,392], leading us to θ 13 8.51 • . The smallness of θ 13 makes the two-flavor interpretations of solar and atmospheric neutrino oscillation data reasonably good, and this turns out to plunk for the light-hearted argument that there seems to exist an intelligent design of the neutrino oscillation parameters [393].…”