2023/12/16 by Lucas Johns, Johns, Lucas, Santiago Rodriguez +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.10340
openalex publication_date 2023/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Neutrinos in core-collapse supernovae and neutron-star mergers are susceptible to flavor instabilities of three kinds: slow, fast, and collisional. Prior work has established mappings of the first two onto abstract mechanical systems in flavor space, respectively named the slow and fast flavor pendula. Here we introduce and analyze the flavor pendulum associated with the third class. We explain our results in terms of the recently developed theory of neutrino quantum thermodynamics. Perhaps our most surprising finding is that there exists a limit in which decoherent interactions drive perfectly coherent flavor conversion.