Collective three-flavor oscillations of supernova neutrinos
- Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai 400005 (India)
Neutrinos and antineutrinos emitted from a core collapse supernova interact among themselves, giving rise to collective flavor conversion effects that are significant near the neutrinosphere. We develop a formalism to analyze these collective effects in the complete three-flavor framework. It naturally generalizes the spin-precession analogy to three flavors and is capable of analytically describing phenomena like vacuum/Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) oscillations, synchronized oscillations, bipolar oscillations, and spectral split. Using the formalism, we demonstrate that the flavor conversions may be 'factorized' into two-flavor oscillations with hierarchical frequencies. We explicitly show how the three-flavor solution may be constructed by combining two-flavor solutions. For a typical supernova density profile, we identify an approximate separation of regions where distinctly different flavor conversion mechanisms operate, and demonstrate the interplay between collective and MSW effects. We pictorialize our results in terms of the 'e{sub 3}-e{sub 8} triangle' diagram, which is a tool that can be used to visualize three-neutrino flavor conversions in general, and offers insights into the analysis of the collective effects in particular.
- OSTI ID:
- 21205047
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 77, Issue 11; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.77.113002; (c) 2008 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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