Collective neutrino oscillations and spontaneous symmetry breaking

Abstract

Neutrino oscillations in a hot and dense astrophysical environment such as a core-collapse supernova pose a challenging, seven-dimensional flavor transport problem. To make the problem even more difficult (and interesting), neutrinos can experience collective oscillations through nonlinear refraction in the dense neutrino medium in this environment. Significant progress has been made in the last decade towards the understanding of collective neutrino oscillations in various simplified neutrino gas models with imposed symmetries and reduced dimensions. However, a series of recent studies seem to have "reset" this progress by showing that these models may not be compatible with collective neutrino oscillations because the latter can break the symmetries spontaneously if they are not imposed. We review some of the key concepts of collective neutrino oscillations by using a few simple toy models. We also elucidate the breaking of spatial and directional symmetries in these models because of collective oscillations.

18 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (13)

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• Collective neutrino flavor transitions in supernovae and the role of trajectory averaging
• Multiple Spectral Splits of Supernova Neutrinos
• Coherent Development of Neutrino Flavor in the Supernova Environment
• Role of dense matter in collective supernova neutrino transformations
• Analysis of Collective Neutrino Flavor Transformation in Supernovae
• Neutrino scattering and flavor transformation in supernovae
• Flavor Evolution of the Neutronization Neutrino Burst from an O-Ne-Mg Core-Collapse Supernova
• Stepwise Spectral Swapping with Three Neutrino Flavors
• Flavor instabilities in the neutrino line model
• Liouville equations for neutrino distribution matrices
• Damping the neutrino flavor pendulum by breaking homogeneity
• Symmetries in collective neutrino oscillations

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Fast neutrino conversions: Ubiquitous in compact binary merger remnants
• Linear Analysis of Fast-Pairwise Collective Neutrino Oscillations in Core-Collapse Supernovae based on the Results of Boltzmann Simulations
• Collective fast neutrino flavor conversions in a 1D box: Initial condition and long-term evolution
• The dispersion relation of the fast neutrino oscillation wave
• Neutrino Flavor Conversions in High-Density Astrophysical and Cosmological Environments
• Searching for Fast Neutrino Flavor Conversion Modes in Core-collapse Supernova Simulations
• Neutrino Flavor Evolution in Binary Neutron Star Merger Remnants
• Physics of neutrino flavor transformation through matter-neutrino resonances
• Neutrino Flavor Evolution in Neutron Star Mergers
• General-Relativistic Quantum-Kinetics Neutrino Transport
• Nonlinear flavor development of a two-dimensional neutrino gas
• Self-induced temporal instability from a neutrino antenna
• Constraining sterile neutrinos by core-collapse supernovae with multiple detectors
• Prospects for Neutrino Spin Coherence in Supernovae
• Turbulence Fingerprint on Collective Oscillations of Supernova Neutrinos
• An optimization-based approach to calculating neutrino flavor evolution
• Collective Oscillations of Majorana Neutrinos in Strong Magnetic Fields and Self-induced Flavor Equilibrium
• Linking neutrino oscillations to the nucleosynthesis of elements
• Neutrino oscillations in a trapping potential