Chaos in Inhomogeneous Neutrino Fast Flavor Instability

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Urquilla, Erick, Richers, Sherwood
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Urquilla, Erick
Richers, Sherwood
author_facet Urquilla, Erick
Richers, Sherwood
contents In dense neutrino gases, the neutrino-neutrino coherent forward scattering gives rise to a complex flavor oscillation phenomenon not fully incorporated in simulations of neutron star mergers (NSM) and core collapse supernovae (CCSNe). Moreover, it has been proposed to be chaotic, potentially limiting our ability to predict neutrino flavor transformations in simulations. To address this issue, we explore how small flavor perturbations evolve in the non-linear regime of the neutrino quantum kinetic equation within a narrow centimeter-scale region inside a NSM and a toy neutrino distribution. Our findings reveal that paths in the flavor state space of solutions with similar initial conditions diverge exponentially, exhibiting chaos. This inherent chaos makes the microscopic scales of neutrino flavor transformations unpredictable. However, the domain-averaged neutrino density matrix remains relatively stable, with chaos minimally affecting it. This particular property suggests that domain-averaged quantities remain reliable despite the exponential amplification of errors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_01936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chaos in Inhomogeneous Neutrino Fast Flavor Instability
Urquilla, Erick
Richers, Sherwood
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
In dense neutrino gases, the neutrino-neutrino coherent forward scattering gives rise to a complex flavor oscillation phenomenon not fully incorporated in simulations of neutron star mergers (NSM) and core collapse supernovae (CCSNe). Moreover, it has been proposed to be chaotic, potentially limiting our ability to predict neutrino flavor transformations in simulations. To address this issue, we explore how small flavor perturbations evolve in the non-linear regime of the neutrino quantum kinetic equation within a narrow centimeter-scale region inside a NSM and a toy neutrino distribution. Our findings reveal that paths in the flavor state space of solutions with similar initial conditions diverge exponentially, exhibiting chaos. This inherent chaos makes the microscopic scales of neutrino flavor transformations unpredictable. However, the domain-averaged neutrino density matrix remains relatively stable, with chaos minimally affecting it. This particular property suggests that domain-averaged quantities remain reliable despite the exponential amplification of errors.
title Chaos in Inhomogeneous Neutrino Fast Flavor Instability
topic High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01936