Nonstandard neutrino-neutrino refractive effects in dense neutrino gases

TL;DR

This paper explores how nonstandard neutrino-neutrino interactions can significantly alter flavor evolution in dense neutrino gases, potentially leading to flavor equilibration and affecting supernova neutrino signals.

Contribution

It demonstrates that nonstandard four-fermion neutrino interactions can induce flavor equilibration and influence collective oscillations in dense neutrino environments, even with very small couplings.

Findings

Nonstandard interactions can cause flavor equilibration in dense neutrino gases.

Small nonstandard couplings can trigger flavor transformations in inverted hierarchy.

Effects are significant if nonstandard interactions are comparable to standard interactions.

Abstract

We investigate the effects of nonstandard four-fermion neutrino-neutrino interactions on the flavor evolution of dense neutrino gases. We find that in the regions where the neutrino-neutrino refractive index leads to collective flavor oscillations, the presence of new neutrino interactions can produce flavor equilibration in both normal and inverted neutrino mass hierarchy. In realistic supernova environments, these effects are significant if the nonstandard neutrino-neutrino interaction strength is comparable to the one expected in the standard case, dominating the ordinary matter potential. However, very small nonstandard neutrino-neutrino couplings are enough to trigger the usual collective neutrino flavor transformations in the inverted neutrino mass hierarchy, even if the mixing angle vanishes exactly.