Page "Neutrino oscillation" Paragraph 12

Neutrino oscillation arises from a mixture between the flavor and mass eigenstates of neutrinos.

That is, the three neutrino states that interact with the charged leptons in weak interactions are each a different superposition of the three neutrino states of definite mass.

Neutrinos are created in weak decays and reactions in their flavor eigenstates.

As a neutrino propagates through space, the quantum mechanical phases of the three mass states advance at slightly different rates due to the slight differences in the neutrino masses.

This results in a changing mixture of mass states as the neutrino travels, but a different mixture of mass states corresponds to a different mixture of flavor states.

So a neutrino born as, say, an electron neutrino will be some mixture of electron, mu, and tau neutrino after traveling some distance.

Since the quantum mechanical phase advances in a periodic fashion, after some distance the state will nearly return to the original mixture, and the neutrino will be again mostly electron neutrino.

The electron flavor content of the neutrino will then continue to oscillate as long as the quantum mechanical state maintains coherence.

It is because the mass differences between the neutrinos are small that the coherence length for neutrino oscillation is so long, making this microscopic quantum effect observable over macroscopic distances.