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Equation 1 · How Particle Physics Beyond the Standard Model Actually Works

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θ12\theta_{12}

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θ12\theta_{12}

Symbol theta_12

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subscript

subscript

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What an experiment like T2K or NOvA reports is not a discovery of new particles but a set of numbers: mixing angles ( θ12\theta_{12} , θ23\theta_{23} , θ13\theta_{13} ) and the mass-squared differences between neutrino mass states, extracted from how oscillation probability varies with neutrino energy over a fixed baseline. A joint 2024 analysis combining a decade of T2K data with six years of NOvA data pushed the precision on one mass-squared splitting below 2%, but — and this is the honest state of the field, not a caveat — it did not resolve whether the neutrino mass ordering is “normal” or “inverted,” and left the CP-violating phase (a potential source of the matter-antimatter asymmetry)…
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What an experiment like T2K or NOvA reports is not a discovery of new particles but a set of numbers: mixing angles ( θ12\theta_{12} , θ23\theta_{23} , θ13\theta_{13} ) and the mass-squared differences between neutrino mass states, extracted from how oscillation probability varies with neutrino energy over a fixed baseline. A joint 2024 analysis combining a decade of T2K data with six years of NOvA data pushed the precision on one mass-squared splitting below 2%, but — and this is the honest state of the field, not a caveat — it did not resolve whether the neutrino mass ordering is “normal” or “inverted,” and left the CP-violating phase (a potential source of the matter-antimatter asymmetry) unresolved under the statistically favored ordering [ 4 ] . The Particle Data Group’s 2024 Review of Particle Physics is the standing reference compilation for the current best-fit ranges on all of these parameters [ 3 ] .

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