Many-body collective neutrino oscillations: recent developments

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in understanding collective neutrino oscillations in dense astrophysical environments, emphasizing quantum many-body effects and their implications for flavor evolution.

Contribution

It summarizes recent developments in modeling many-body quantum effects in collective neutrino oscillations in supernovae and neutron star mergers.

Findings

Advances in understanding quantum entanglement in neutrino systems

Insights into flavor transformation mechanisms in dense environments

Progress in modeling collective effects in neutrino oscillations

Abstract

Neutrino flavor transformations in core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers represent a complex and unsolved problem that is integral to our understanding of the dynamics and nucleosynthesis in these environments. The high number densities of neutrinos present in these environments can engender various collective effects in neutrino flavor transformations, driven either by neutrino-neutrino coherent scattering, or in some cases, through collisional (incoherent) interactions. An ensemble of neutrinos undergoing coherent scattering among themselves is an interacting quantum many-body system -- as such, there is a tantalising prospect of quantum entanglement developing between the neutrinos, which can leave imprints on their flavor evolution histories. Here, we seek to summarize recent progress that has been made towards understanding this phenomenon.