Triggering collective oscillations by three-flavor effects
Abstract
Collective flavor transformations in supernovae, caused by neutrino-neutrino interactions, are essentially a two-flavor phenomenon driven by the atmospheric mass difference and the small mixing angle theta_13. In the two-flavor approximation, the initial evolution depends logarithmically on theta_13 and the system remains trapped in an unstable fixed point for theta_13 = 0. However, any effect breaking exact nu_mu-nu_tau equivalence triggers the conversion. Such three-flavor perturbations include radiative corrections to weak interactions, small differences between the nu_mu and nu_tau fluxes, or non-standard interactions. Therefore, extremely small values of theta_13 are in practice equivalent, the fate of the system depending only on the neutrino spectra and their mass ordering.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1001.5396,
title = {Triggering collective oscillations by three-flavor effects},
author = {Basudeb Dasgupta and Georg G. Raffelt and Irene Tamborra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.5396},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
6 pages, including 3 figures (slightly modified to match the published version). Accepted for publication in PRD.