The ubiquitous flavor pendulum

TL;DR

This paper explains why the flavor pendulum behavior is universal in dense neutrino systems, showing that classical spin models always exhibit pendular dynamics and identifying the underlying reasons for this phenomenon.

Contribution

It demonstrates that classical spin systems inherently display pendular behavior, providing a unifying explanation for the ubiquity of flavor pendula in neutrino physics.

Findings

Three classical spins always behave as a pendulum.

A continuum of vectors with fixed length emerges in these systems.

Any spin can serve as the pendulum, exchanging flavor periodically.

Abstract

A system of classical interacting spins can develop collective instabilities which, in the nonlinear regime, mimic the motion of a gyroscopic pendulum. Known as the flavor pendulum, this behavior appears among the collective modes of a dense neutrino plasma after a strong reduction of phase space through symmetry assumptions. It has been identified in homogeneous slow and fast flavor systems and, most recently, in single-wave solutions of the fast system. We explain the reasons for its ubiquitous appearance. We show that a system of three classical spins must always be pendular, or only two in the presence of an external field. Furthermore, such a system always defines a continuum of vectors with time-independent length. If these are identified as interacting spins, they immediately lead to the continuum cases of slow and fast flavor pendula. As another new insight, any of these spins can be chosen as the pendulum, periodically exchanging flavor with the rest of the system.