and not in one of the neutrino's own mass eigenstates. Because the neutrino is in a coherent superposition that is not a mass eigenstate, the mixture that makes up that superposition oscillates significantly as it travels. No analogous mechanism exists in the Standard Model that would make charged leptons detectably oscillate. In the four decays mentioned above, where the charged lepton is emitted in a unique mass eigenstate, the charged lepton will not oscillate, as single mass eigenstates propagate without oscillation. The case of (real) W boson decay is more complicated: W boson decay is sufficiently energetic to generate a charged lepton that is not in a mass eigenstate; however, the charged lepton would lose coherence, if it had any, over interatomic distances (0.1 nm) and would thus quickly cease any meaningful oscillation. More importantly, no mechanism in the Standard Model is capable of pinning down a charged lepton into a coherent state that is not a mass eigenstate, in the first place; instead, while the charged lepton from the W boson decay is not initially in a mass eigenstate, neither is it in any "neutrino-centric" eigenstate, nor in any other coherent state. It cannot meaningfully be said that such a featureless charged lepton oscillates or that it does not oscillate, as any "oscillation" transformation would just leave it the same generic state that it was before the oscillation. Therefore, detection of a charged lepton oscillation from W boson decay is infeasible on multiple levels. Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata matrix The idea of neutrino oscillation was first put forward in 1957 by Bruno Pontecorvo, who proposed that neutrino–antineutrino transitions may occur in analogy with neutral kaon mixing. Although such matter–antimatter oscillation had not been observed, this idea formed the conceptual foundation for the quantitative theory of neutrino flavor oscillation, which was first developed by Maki, Nakagawa, and Sakata in 1962 and further elaborated by Pontecorvo in 1967. One year later the solar neutrino deficit was first observed, and that was followed by the famous article by Gribov and Pontecorvo published in 1969 titled "Neutrino astronomy and lepton charge". The concept of neutrino mixing is a natural outcome of gauge theories with massive neutrinos, and its structure can be characterized in general. In its simplest form it is expressed as a unitary transformation relating the flavor and mass eigenbasis and can be written as where is a neutrino with definite flavor = (electron), (muon)