Probing the equation of state of neutron stars using neutrino oscillations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how neutrino oscillations affected by the star's gravitational field can reveal the internal equation of state of neutron stars by analyzing neutrino flavor composition.

Contribution

It introduces a method to probe neutron star interiors by linking neutrino flavor transitions to the star's spacetime metric and matter state.

Findings

Neutrino flavor transition probabilities depend on the star's interior metric.

Different equations of state produce distinguishable neutrino flavor signatures.

Potential to determine neutron star matter properties through neutrino observations.

Abstract

We study the phenomena of neutrino oscillations and flavour mixing by incorporating the gravitational effects through the Dirac equation in curved spacetime inside a spherically symmetric star. We show that the flavour transition probabilities of the neutrinos depend on the interior spacetime metric as they propagate out of the star. As a consequence, we show that one could distinguish between different possible equation of states of nuclear matter even for an isolated neutron star if one could determine the flavour composition of emitted neutrinos near the stellar surface.