Analysis of matter suppression in collective neutrino oscillations during the supernova accretion phase

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dense matter in supernovae during the accretion phase suppresses or decoheres collective neutrino oscillations, affecting neutrino signals and explosion dynamics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that matter effects can fully suppress or decohere neutrino flavor conversions during supernova accretion, altering previous assumptions about collective oscillations.

Findings

Matter suppression prevents neutrino oscillation impact on explosion dynamics.

Decoherence occurs when electron density is comparable to neutrino density.

Implications for neutrino signal interpretation and mass hierarchy detection.

Abstract

The usual description of self-induced neutrino flavor conversions in core collapse supernovae (SNe) is based on the dominance of the neutrino density n_nu over the net electron density n_e. However, this condition is not met during the post-bounce accretion phase, when the dense matter in a SN is piled up above the neutrinosphere. As recently pointed-out, a dominant matter term in the anisotropic SN environment would dephase the flavor evolution for neutrinos traveling on different trajectories, challenging the occurrence of the collective behavior in the dense neutrino gas. Using the results from recent long term simulations of core-collapse SN explosions, based on three flavor Boltzmann neutrino transport in spherical symmetry, we find that both the situations of complete matter suppression (when n_e >> n_nu) and matter-induced decoherence (when n_e \gtrsim n_nu) of flavor conversions are realized during the accretion phase. The matter suppression at high densities prevents any possible impact of the neutrino oscillations on the neutrino heating and hence on the dynamics of the explosion. Furthermore, it changes the interpretation of the Earth matter effect on the SN neutrino signal during the accretion phase, allowing the possibility of the neutrino mass hierarchy discrimination at not too small values of the leptonic mixing angle \theta_{13} (i.e. \sin^2{\theta}_{13} \gtrsim 10^{-3}).