Fast Neutrino Flavor Conversion at Late Time

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nonlinear evolution of fast neutrino flavor conversions in supernovae, providing numerical and analytical insights into their impact on neutrino fluxes and supernova dynamics.

Contribution

It offers one of the first combined numerical and analytical studies of nonlinear neutrino flavor evolution considering spatial inhomogeneity and velocity spectra.

Findings

Final state flavor dynamics depend on space-time and phase space variables.

The study clarifies how lepton asymmetry influences flavor conversion.

Implications for supernova neutrino signals and explosion mechanisms.

Abstract

We all know that in the dense anisotropic interior of the star, neutrino-neutrino forward-scattering can lead to fast collective neutrino oscillations, which has striking consequences on flavor dependent neutrino emission and can be crucial for the evolution of a supernova and its neutrino signal. The flavor evolution of such dense neutrino system is governed by a large number of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations which are almost always very difficult to solve. Although the triggering, initial linear growth and the condition for fast oscillations to occur are understood by "Linear stability analysis" but this fails to answer an important question: "what is the impact of fast flavor conversion on observable neutrino fluxes or the supernova explosion mechanism?". This is a significantly harder problem that requires understanding the nature of the final state solution in the nonlinear regime. Moving towards this direction we present one of the first numerical as well as an analytical study of the coupled flavor evolution of a non-stationary and inhomogeneous dense neutrino system in the nonlinear regime considering one spatial dimension and a spectrum of velocity modes. This work gives a clear picture of the final state flavor dynamics of such systems specifying its dependence on space-time coordinates, phase space variables as well as the lepton asymmetry and thus can have significant implications for the supernova astrophysics as well as its associated neutrino phenomenology even for the most realistic scenario.