One of the most peculiar and unexplained phenomena in the Standard Model is the repetition of generations. It is known that there are three generations of quarks and leptons. The famous electron-muon-tau universality is a distinguishing example of the...
One of the most peculiar and unexplained phenomena in the Standard Model is the repetition of generations. It is known that there are three generations of quarks and leptons. The famous electron-muon-tau universality is a distinguishing example of the repetition of generations.
The weak interactions can distinguish one generation from another, because they depend on the quark flavours, and the various lepton numbers. This implies that the generations are not the eigenstates of the weak interactions. In fact, the fermionic states that are diagonal with respect to the weak interactions are not the eigenstates of the mass matirx of the corresponding fermions.
Since the weak eigenstates are not identical with the mass eigenstates, there inevitably occurs the oscillation phenomena and mixing between them. This kind of mixing has been well observed in the quark sector through the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix. On the other hand, until recently, the lepton sector has been immune to the mixing, principally because the neutrinos are massless. However, as the recent result from the SuperKamiokande experiment has shown the hint of oscillations among neutrinos, it becomes quite likely that the neutrinos have non-zero masses, and thus it is reasonable to expect that mixings may also occur in the lepton sector.
We review the mixings in the quark sector as well as in the lepton sector. The mechanisim and the basic ideas of the mixings are discussed.