Flavomon ray tracing in matter gradients

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flavomon ray tracing framework to analyze flavor instabilities in neutrino plasmas within matter gradients, enhancing understanding of their evolution in supernova environments.

Contribution

It derives flavomon equations of motion in inhomogeneous environments and develops a new ray tracing approach for flavor instability evolution.

Findings

Matter gradients slow down neutrino-mass-induced instabilities.

Local stability analysis is insufficient without flavomon ray tracing.

The approach couples stability analysis with ray tracing for global evolution.

Abstract

Flavor instabilities develop in neutrino plasmas through emission of flavomons, the quanta of flavor waves. We derive the flavomon equations of motion in slowly varying environments, notably the matter gradients of supernovae, and use them to construct a flavomon ray tracing framework. Combined with a quasi-linear description of flavomon growth, we thus develop a new approach to the global evolution of flavor instabilities. As a first application, we show that the growth of neutrino-mass-induced instabilities is slowed down, but not suppressed, by the inevitable matter gradients. Local stability analysis alone cannot gauge the impact of inhomogeneities and instead must be coupled to flavomon ray tracing.