Interaction of supernova neutrinos with stochastic gravitational waves

Abstract

We examine the propagation and flavor oscillations of neutrinos under the influence of gravitational waves (GWs) with an arbitrary polarization. We rederive the effective Hamiltonian for the system of three neutrino flavors using the perturbative approach. Then, using this result, we consider the evolution of neutrino flavors in stochastic GWs with a general energy density spectrum. The equation for the density matrix is obtained and solved analytically in the case of three neutrino flavors. As an application, we study the evolution of the flavor content of a neutrino beam emitted in a core-collapsing supernova. We obtain the analytical expressions for the contributions of GWs to the neutrino fluxes and for the damping decrement, which describes the attenuation of the fluxes to their asymptotic values. We find that the contribution to the evolution of neutrino fluxes from GWs, emitted by merging supermassive black holes, dominates over that from black holes with stellar masses. The implication of the obtained results for the measurement of astrophysical neutrinos with neutrino telescopes is discussed.

10 pages in RevTeX, 2 eps figures; paper is significantly revised, especially Sec. III, new Fig. 2 is added; matches version published in PRD

References in corpus (5)

• Supernova Signatures of Neutrino Mass Ordering
• General treatment of quantum and classical spinning particles in external fields
• IceCube Search for Neutrinos Coincident with Compact Binary Mergers from LIGO-Virgo's First Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
• Neutrino spin oscillations in external fields in curved spacetime
• Evolution of Primordial Neutrino Helicities in Cosmic Gravitational Inhomogeneities

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Gravitational waves and neutrino oscillations in Chern-Simons axion gravity
• Astrophysical neutrino oscillations after pulsar timing array analyses
• Neutrino spin and flavor oscillations in gravitational fields
• Impact of hypermagnetic fields on relic gravitational waves, neutrino oscillations and baryon asymmetry
• Exploring the nature of neutrinos in a dissipative environment
• Neutrino oscillations in gravitational fields and astrophysical applications
• Neutrino decoherence and violation of the strong equivalence principle
• Spin and flavor oscillations of neutrinos in gravitational fields
• A comment on lepton mixing