Strange mechanics of the neutrino flavor pendulum

Abstract

We identify in the flavor transformation of astrophysical neutrinos a new class of phenomena, a common outcome of which is the suppression of flavor conversion. Appealing to the equivalence between a bipolar neutrino system and a gyroscopic pendulum, we find that these phenomena have rather striking interpretations in the mechanical picture: in one instance, the gyroscopic pendulum initially precesses in one direction, then comes to a halt and begins to precess in the opposite direction---a counterintuitive behavior that we analogize to the motion of a toy known as a rattleback. We analyze these behaviors in the early universe, wherein a chance connection to sterile neutrino dark matter emerges, and we briefly suggest how they might manifest in compact-object environments.

9 pages including supplemental material, 2+1 figures

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Neutrino oscillations in supernovae: angular moments and fast instabilities
• Collisional flavor instabilities of supernova neutrinos
• Fast oscillations, collisionless relaxation, and spurious evolution of supernova neutrino flavor
• Neutrino Flavor Pendulum Reloaded: The Case of Fast Pairwise Conversion
• Fast Neutrino Flavor Conversion at Late Time
• Collisional instabilities of neutrinos and their interplay with fast flavor conversion in compact objects
• Self-interacting sterile neutrino dark matter: the heavy-mediator case
• Supernova fast flavor conversions in 1+1D : Influence of mu-tau neutrinos
• Self-consistency in models of neutrino scattering and fast flavor conversion
• Neutrino many-body correlations
• Derivation of the sterile neutrino Boltzmann equation from quantum kinetics
• Inference of neutrino flavor evolution through data assimilation and neural differential equations
• Subgrid modeling of neutrino oscillations in astrophysics
• Thermodynamics of oscillating neutrinos
• Inference offers a metric to constrain dynamical models of neutrino flavor transformation
• Spatiotemporal linear instability analysis of collective neutrino flavor conversion in 4-dimensional spacetime
• Neutrino oscillations in a trapping potential