2003/07/10 by Alexander Friedland, Cecilia Lunardini · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2003/10/043
published as JHEP 0310:043,2003 · 25 pages, 1 figure
arxiv created 2003/07/10 · openalex publication_date 2003/10/20 · arxiv updated 2010/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We investigate whether coherent flavor conversion of neutrinos in a neutrino background is substantially modified by many-body effects, with respect to the conventional one-particle effective description. We study the evolution of a system of interacting neutrino plane waves in a box. Using its equivalence to a system of spins, we determine the character of its behavior completely analytically. We find that, if the neutrinos are initially in flavor eigenstates, no coherent flavor conversion is realized, in agreement with the effective one-particle description. This result does not depend on the size of the neutrino wavepackets and therefore has a general character. The validity of the several important applications of the one-particle formalism is thus confirmed.