Code Comparison for Fast Flavor Instability Simulation

TL;DR

This paper compares five independent simulation codes for the fast flavor instability in astrophysical environments, providing a benchmark to evaluate numerical accuracy and consistency across different methods.

Contribution

It introduces a standardized test problem for FFI simulation and verifies the fidelity of five codes, establishing a benchmark for future research.

Findings

All codes faithfully simulate quantum kinetic equations under specified assumptions.

Each code demonstrates superiority in at least one numerical accuracy metric.

Results are publicly available for community benchmarking.

Abstract

The fast flavor instability (FFI) is expected to be ubiquitous in core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers. It rapidly shuffles neutrino flavor in a way that could impact the explosion mechanism, neutrino signals, mass outflows, and nucleosynthesis. The variety of initial conditions and simulation methods employed in simulations of the FFI prevent an apples-to-apples comparison of the results. We simulate a standardized test problem using five independent codes and verify that they are all faithfully simulating the underlying quantum kinetic equations under the assumptions of axial symmetry and homogeneity in two directions. We quantify the amount of numerical error in each method and demonstrate that each method is superior in at least one metric of this error. We make the results publicly available to serve as a benchmark.