Steady state of fast-oscillating neutrinos in an inhomogeneous medium

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Goimil-García, Manuel, Tamborra, Irene
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Goimil-García, Manuel
Tamborra, Irene
author_facet Goimil-García, Manuel
Tamborra, Irene
contents The streaming of neutrinos in an inhomogeneous medium is known to affect the physics of flavor conversion. We employ an ensemble of single-crossed angular distributions and explore the physics of flavor conversion, while neutrinos propagate across a one-dimensional inhomogeneous medium. The advective term in the neutrino equations of motion is responsible for the cascade of flavor waves towards ever smaller spatial and angular scales. However, as the system evolves, perturbations with large wavenumbers are damped, with a resulting smearing of the flavor configuration. We provide a simple recipe that allows to forecast the steady-state flavor configuration achieved by neutrinos without solving their kinetic equations. In particular, we find that flavor equipartition on one side of the angular spectrum and the cancellation of the spectral crossing in the lepton number distributions, proposed in the literature as generic flavor outcome, is a special solution depending on the degree of neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry. This work constitutes a step forward towards the development of semi-analytic schemes to account for flavor conversion physics in hydrodynamic simulations of core-collapse supernovae and neutron-star merger remnants.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22805
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Steady state of fast-oscillating neutrinos in an inhomogeneous medium
Goimil-García, Manuel
Tamborra, Irene
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
The streaming of neutrinos in an inhomogeneous medium is known to affect the physics of flavor conversion. We employ an ensemble of single-crossed angular distributions and explore the physics of flavor conversion, while neutrinos propagate across a one-dimensional inhomogeneous medium. The advective term in the neutrino equations of motion is responsible for the cascade of flavor waves towards ever smaller spatial and angular scales. However, as the system evolves, perturbations with large wavenumbers are damped, with a resulting smearing of the flavor configuration. We provide a simple recipe that allows to forecast the steady-state flavor configuration achieved by neutrinos without solving their kinetic equations. In particular, we find that flavor equipartition on one side of the angular spectrum and the cancellation of the spectral crossing in the lepton number distributions, proposed in the literature as generic flavor outcome, is a special solution depending on the degree of neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry. This work constitutes a step forward towards the development of semi-analytic schemes to account for flavor conversion physics in hydrodynamic simulations of core-collapse supernovae and neutron-star merger remnants.
title Steady state of fast-oscillating neutrinos in an inhomogeneous medium
topic High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22805