Supernova fast flavor conversions in 1+1D : Influence of mu-tau neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper investigates fast neutrino flavor conversions in supernovae considering six neutrino species, demonstrating that previous three-species approximations remain qualitatively valid even with more complex models.

Contribution

The study performs numerical simulations of neutrino flavor evolution in space and time with six species, highlighting the importance of moving beyond three-species models.

Findings

Results are qualitatively similar to previous three-species models.

Six-species simulations confirm the robustness of earlier findings.

Emphasizes the necessity of including all neutrino species in supernova models.

Abstract

In the dense supernova environment, neutrinos can undergo fast flavor conversions which depend on the large neutrino-neutrino interaction strength. It has been recently shown that both their presence and outcome can be affected when passing from the commonly used three neutrino species approach to the more general one with six species. Here, we build up on a previous work performed on this topic and perform a numerical simulation of flavor evolution in both space and time, assuming six neutrino species. We find that the results presented in our previous work remain qualitatively the same even for flavor evolution in space and time. This emphasizes the need for going beyond the simplistic approximation with three species when studying fast flavor conversions.