Dispersion relation of the neutrino plasma: Unifying fast, slow, and collisional instabilities

TL;DR

This paper develops a unified analytical framework for understanding neutrino flavor instabilities in dense astrophysical environments, covering fast, slow, and collisional regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive dispersion relation approach that classifies and approximates unstable modes across different regimes, unifying previous separate analyses.

Findings

Slow and collisional instabilities grow much more slowly than they oscillate.

Fast modes may be poorly approximated by local evolution assumptions.

Unified dispersion relations reveal the nature and magnitude of growth rates.

Abstract

In neutrino-dense astrophysical environments, these particles exchange flavor through a coherent weak field, forming a collisionless neutrino plasma with collective flavor dynamics. Instabilities, which grow and affect the environment, may arise from neutrino-neutrino refraction alone (fast limit), vacuum energy splittings caused by masses (slow limit), or neutrino-matter scattering (collisional limit). We present a comprehensive analytical description of the dispersion relation governing these unstable modes. Treating vacuum energy splittings and collision rates as small perturbations, we construct a unified framework for fast, slow, and collisional instabilities. We classify modes into gapped, where collective excitations are already present in the fast limit but rendered unstable by slow or collisional effects, and gapless, which are purely generated by these effects. For each class, we derive approximate dispersion relations for generic energy and angle distributions, which reveal the order of magnitude of the growth rates and the nature of the instabilities without solving directly the dispersion relation. This approach confirms that slow and collisionally unstable waves generally grow much more slowly than they oscillate. Consequently, the common fast-mode approximation of local evolution within small boxes is unjustified. Even for fast modes, neglecting large-distance propagation of growing waves, as usually done, may be a poor approximation. Our unified framework provides an intuitive understanding of the linear phase of flavor evolution across all regimes and paves the way for a quasi-linear treatment of the instability's nonlinear development.