2008/03/26 by Huaiyu Duan, George M. Fuller, J. Carlson · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1749-4699/1/1/015007
published as Comput.Sci.Dis.1:015007,2008 · 25 pages, 6 figures. Links to simulations movies are embedded
arxiv created 2008/03/26 · openalex publication_date 2008/11/20 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We discuss a new kind of astrophysical transport problem: the coherent evolution of neutrino flavor in core collapse supernovae. Solution of this problem requires a numerical approach which can simulate accurately the quantum mechanical coupling of intersecting neutrino trajectories and the associated nonlinearity which characterizes neutrino flavor conversion. We describe here the two codes developed to attack this problem. We also describe the surprising phenomena revealed by these numerical calculations. Chief among these is that the nonlinearities in the problem can engineer neutrino flavor transformation which is dramatically different to that in standard Mikheyev–Smirnov–Wolfenstein treatments. This happens even though the neutrino mass-squared differences are measured to be small, and even when neutrino self-coupling is sub-dominant. Our numerical work has revealed potential signatures which, if detected in the neutrino burst from a Galactic core collapse event, could reveal heretofore unmeasurable properties of the neutrinos, such as the mass hierarchy and vacuum mixing angle θ 13 .