Turbulence Fingerprint on Collective Oscillations of Supernova Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper reveals how turbulence-induced matter density fluctuations can cause widespread neutrino flavor conversions in supernovae, significantly impacting our understanding of neutrino physics in these environments.

Contribution

It introduces a new leakage mechanism linking turbulence to neutrino flavor instabilities, enabling flavor conversions without fast modes in supernova cores.

Findings

Turbulence causes flavor instability leakage across Fourier modes.

Flavor conversions can occur deep inside supernovae without fast modes.

Turbulence significantly alters neutrino flavor dynamics in supernovae.

Abstract

We bring to light a novel mechanism through which turbulent matter density fluctuations can induce collective neutrino flavor conversions in core-collapse supernovae, i.e., the leakage of flavor instabilities between different Fourier modes. The leakage mechanism leaves its notable fingerprint on the flavor stability of a dense neutrino gas by coupling flavor conversion modes on different scales which in turn, makes the flavor instabilities almost ubiquitous in the Fourier space. The most remarkable consequence of this effect is in that it allows for the presence of significant flavor conversions in the deepest supernova regions even in the absence of the so-called fast modes. This is yet another crucial impact of turbulence on the physics of core-collapse supernovae which can profoundly change our understanding of neutrino flavor conversions in the supernova environment.