English

Sufficient and Necessary Conditions for Collective Neutrino Instability: Fast, Slow, and Mixed

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-02-13 v3 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Collective neutrino oscillations exhibit instabilities that induce appreciable flavor conversion, with crucial astrophysical implications. While the importance of initial phase-space distributions is well-established, a general instability criterion for distributions dependent on both energy and emission angle has been lacking. We identify and analyze the sufficient (and necessary) conditions for a generic collective neutrino flavor instability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.03886,
  title  = {Sufficient and Necessary Conditions for Collective Neutrino Instability: Fast, Slow, and Mixed},
  author = {Basudeb Dasgupta and Dwaipayan Mukherjee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.03886},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 8 figures; Improved proof in Sec. IV.B.3 matches the published version