Simulating nonlinear neutrino flavor evolution

Abstract

We discuss a new kind of astrophysical transport problem: the coherent evolution of neutrino flavor in core collapse supernovae. Solution of this problem requires a numerical approach which can simulate accurately the quantum mechanical coupling of intersecting neutrino trajectories and the associated nonlinearity which characterizes neutrino flavor conversion. We describe here the two codes developed to attack this problem. We also describe the surprising phenomena revealed by these numerical calculations. Chief among these is that the nonlinearities in the problem can engineer neutrino flavor transformation which is dramatically different than in standard Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein treatments. This happens even though the neutrino mass-squared differences are measured to be small, and even when neutrino self-coupling is sub-dominant. Our numerical work has revealed potential signatures which, if detected in the neutrino burst from a Galactic core collapse event, could reveal heretofore unmeasurable properties of the neutrinos, such as the mass hierarchy and vacuum mixing angle theta_13.

25 pages, 6 figures. Links to simulations movies are embedded

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Collective neutrino oscillations in non-spherical geometry
• Three Flavor Neutrino Oscillations in Matter: Flavor Diagonal Potentials, the Adiabatic Basis and the CP phase
• Realistic Earth matter effects and a method to acquire information about small θ_{13} in the detection of supernova neutrinos
• Neutrino oscillations in magnetically driven supernova explosions
• Moment equations of neutrinos in supernova
• Emission angle distribution and flavor transformation of supernova neutrinos