Neutrino Flavor Conversions in High-Density Astrophysical and Cosmological Environments

TL;DR

This paper reviews the complex phenomenon of neutrino flavor conversions in dense astrophysical and cosmological environments, highlighting its theoretical challenges and implications for cosmology and astrophysics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of current understanding and recent developments in neutrino flavor conversions across various dense astrophysical settings.

Findings

Neutrino flavor conversions impact primordial nucleosynthesis.

Flavor conversions influence supernova explosion mechanisms.

The review highlights ongoing theoretical challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

Despite being a well understood phenomenon in the context of current terrestrial experiments, neutrino flavor conversions in dense astrophysical environments probably represent one of the most challenging open problems in neutrino physics. Apart from being theoretically interesting, such a problem has several phenomenological implications in cosmology and in astrophysics, including the primordial nucleosynthesis of light elements abundance and other cosmological observables, nucleosynthesis of heavy nuclei and the explosion of massive stars. In this review, we briefly summarize the state of the art on this topic, focusing on three environments: early universe, core-collapse supernovae and compact binary mergers.