English

Fast neutrino conversions: Ubiquitous in compact binary merger remnants

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2017-05-17 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Nuclear Theory

Abstract

The massive neutron star (NS) or black hole (BH) accretion disk resulting from NS--NS or NS--BH mergers is dense in neutrinos. We present the first study on the role of angular distributions in the neutrino flavor conversion above the remnant disk. In particular, we focus on "fast" pairwise conversions whose rate depends on the local angular intensity of the electron lepton number carried by neutrinos. Because of the emission geometry and the flux density of νˉe\bar{\nu}_e being larger than that of νe\nu_e, fast conversions prove to be a generic phenomenon in NS--NS and NS--BH mergers for physically motivated disturbances in the mean field of flavor coherence. Our findings suggest that, differently from the core-collapse supernova case, fast flavor conversions seem to be unavoidable in compact mergers and could have major consequences for the jet dynamics and the synthesis of elements above the remnant disk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.06580,
  title  = {Fast neutrino conversions: Ubiquitous in compact binary merger remnants},
  author = {Meng-Ru Wu and Irene Tamborra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.06580},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

10 pages, 9 figures, matches the published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:57:43.830Z