Collective flavor oscillations of supernova neutrinos and r-process nucleosynthesis

Journal Article · Tue Jun 01 04:00:00 EDT 2010 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2010/06/007· OSTI ID:22272908

Chakraborty, Sovan; Kar, Kamales ^[1]; Choubey, Sandhya ^[2]; Goswami, Srubabati ^[3]

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1. Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, 1/AF Bidhannagar, Kolkata 700064 (India)
2. Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Chhatnag Road, Jhunsi, Allahabad 211019 (India)
3. Physical Research Laboratory, Navrangpura, Ahmedabad 380009 (India)

Neutrino-neutrino interactions inside core-collapse supernovae may give rise to collective flavor oscillations resulting in swap between flavors. These oscillations depend on the initial energy spectra, and relative fluxes or relative luminosities of the neutrinos. It has been observed that departure from energy equipartition among different flavors can give rise to one or more sharp spectral swap over energy, termed as splits. We study the occurrence of splits in the neutrino and antineutrino spectra, varying the initial relative fluxes for different models of initial energy spectrum, in both normal and inverted hierarchy. These initial relative flux variations give rise to several possible split patterns whereas variation over different models of energy spectra give similar results. We explore the effect of these spectral splits on the electron fraction, Y{sub e}, that governs r-process nucleosynthesis inside supernovae. Since spectral splits modify the electron neutrino and antineutrino spectra in the region where r-process is postulated to happen, and since the pattern of spectral splits depends on the initial conditions of the spectra and the neutrino mass hierarchy, we show that the condition Y{sub e} < 0.5 required for successful r-process nucleosynthesis will lead to constraints on the initial spectral conditions, for a given neutrino mass hierarchy.

• OSTI ID: 22272908
• Journal Information: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Journal Name: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics Journal Issue: 06 Vol. 2010; ISSN 1475-7516
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
ANTINEUTRINOS
ELECTRON NEUTRINOS
ELECTRONS
ENERGY SPECTRA
FLAVOR MODEL
LIMITING VALUES
LUMINOSITY
NEUTRINO-NEUTRINO INTERACTIONS
NUCLEOSYNTHESIS
R PROCESS
REST MASS
SUPERNOVAE
VARIATIONS