Muon-induced collisional flavor instability in core-collapse supernova

TL;DR

This paper investigates how on-shell muons influence collisional flavor instabilities in core-collapse supernovae, revealing conditions for their occurrence and potential impacts on neutrino flavor conversions at high densities.

Contribution

It analytically demonstrates the necessity of breaking beta- and pair equilibrium for CFIs and explores muon-induced resonance-like CFIs in supernova conditions.

Findings

CFIs require breaking beta- and pair equilibrium.

Muon-induced CFIs can occur in high-density regions (>10^{13} g/cm^3).

Resonance-like CFIs with higher growth rates can be triggered by muons.

Abstract

Neutrinos are known to undergo flavor conversion among their three flavors. In the theoretical modeling of core-collapse supernova (CCSN), there has been a great deal of attention to recent discoveries of a new type of neutrino flavor conversions, namely collisional flavor instability (CFI), in which the instability is induced by the flavor-dependent decoherence due to the disparity of neutrino-matter interactions among flavors. In this paper, we study how the appearance of on-shell muons and associated neutrino-matter interactions can impact CFIs based on linear stability analysis of flavor conversions. Some striking results emerge from the present study. First, we analytically show that breaking beta- and pair equilibrium is a necessary condition to trigger CFIs. This also indicates that CFIs with on-shell muons could appear in $e \tau$ and $\mu \tau$ neutrino mixing sectors in very high-density region ($\gtrsim 10^{13} {\rm g/cm^{3}}$), exhibiting a possibility of large impacts of CFIs on CCSN. Second, resonance-like CFIs, having a much higher growth rate than normal CFIs, can be triggered by muons. The resonance point of CFIs is different between $e \tau$ and $\mu \tau$ sectors; the former (latter) occurs at $\mu_{e (\mu)} = \mu_{n} - \mu_{p}$, where $\mu_{i}$ denotes the chemical potential of $i$ constitute ($n$ and $p$ represent neutrons and protons, respectively). Our result suggests that the non-linear evolution of CFI with on-shell muons would induce flavor conversions with the complex interplay among all three different neutrino-mixing sectors.