Re: neutrino oscillation, right-left flipping, decay, Higgs, mass ->how?

Dear Questioner,

thanks for your question. You are asking a lot of questions, which are partly related and partly not. So let me single out three main question:

1.) What is neutrino oscillation? And is there a similar effect for quarks?
2.) How is mass generated?

Questions 1.) and question 2.) are not related. This effects have completely different reasons. Neutrino oscillations are related to the mass of neutrinos, but not the generation of mass itself.

ad question 1.) If neutrinos have (different) mass the effect of neutrino oscillation might occur. The reason for oscillations is that the mass eigenstates of the different types of neutrinos do not coincide with the neutrino states that occur in the (so-called weak) interaction. The mass eigenstates are the particles that propagate through space and time, they are solutions of the quantum mechanical Schroedinger equation. The interaction eigenstates are the particles that are generated in the interaction e.g. the decay of other particles. These are the muon, tauon and electron neutrinos. The Schroedinger equation gouverns the evolution in time of of the mass eigenstates. Because of the difference in mass the eigenstates evolve differently. So take e.g. a muon neutrino propagating (e.g. from the sun towards Earth). Quantum mechanically speaking, the muon neutrino is a certain superposition of mass eigenstates. The mass eigenstates evolve now in time, each one differently. So mixture of neutrino mass state changes. There arises the possibility that in a measurement (or in another physical interaction) we observe a tauon neutrino or an electron neutrino. It's called oscillation since after some time you might again observe a muon neutrino.
For a very good introduction on the net see Introduction to neutrino oscillations.

Quarks are different particles: e.g. quarks are bosons (spin=1), neutrinos are leptons (spin=1/2). So the behaviour of quarks and neutrinos is completely different. No oscillations occur for quarks.

Maybe one word to the use of the "decay". A "decay" is an interaction between particles, where the particles in the end have lesser mass than the particles in the beginning. It's a kind of interaction. The neutrino oscillation is no interaction, but it's an effect of propagation and free evolution.

ad question 2.) The generation of mass is due to the so-called HIggs effect. Neutrino oscillation has nothing to do with it. Different masses for different neutrino types is a necessary prerequisite for oscillation; oscillation does not generate them. At first all, matter particles are massless. They couple to the Higgs particle. Via this interation the propagation of the matter particle is impeded, and the particle attains mass.

Best regards
Michael