Abstract
We investigate the stability, with respect to spatial inhomogeneity, of a two-dimensional dense neutrino gas. The system exhibits growth of seed inhomogeneity due to nonlinear coherent neutrino self-interactions. In the absence of incoherent collisional effects, we observe a dependence of this instability growth rate on the neutrino mass spectrum: the normal neutrino mass hierarchy exhibits spatial instability over a larger range of neutrino number density compared to that of the inverted case. We further consider the effect of elastic incoherent collisions of the neutrinos with a static background of heavy, nucleon-like scatterers. At small scales, the growth of flavor instability can be suppressed by collisions. At large length scales we find, perhaps surprisingly, that for inverted neutrino mass hierarchy incoherent collisions fail to suppress flavor instabilities, independent of the coupling strength.
Highlights
Several recent studies, concerned primarily with anisotropic astrophysical environments, have demonstrated that the nonlinear neutrino self-coupling results in spatial instabilities [1,2,3,4]
In this Letter we study the stability of a two-dimensional, two-flavor dense neutrino gas with respect to the growth of seed spatial inhomogeneity driven by neutrino self-coupling
We have studied the stability of a two-dimensional dense neutrino gas with respect to spatial inhomogeneity
Summary
Several recent studies, concerned primarily with anisotropic astrophysical environments, have demonstrated that the nonlinear neutrino self-coupling results in spatial instabilities [1,2,3,4] These works indicate the importance of taking into account deviations from spherical symmetry in describing the evolution of, for example, the supernova neutrino flavor field. The objective of the present study is to address the validity of this assumption in an exploratory calculation To this end, in this Letter we study the stability of a two-dimensional, two-flavor dense neutrino gas with respect to the growth of seed spatial inhomogeneity driven by neutrino self-coupling. In this Letter we study the stability of a two-dimensional, two-flavor dense neutrino gas with respect to the growth of seed spatial inhomogeneity driven by neutrino self-coupling In this model, we investigate the impact of incoherent elastic collisions on the stability properties. Perhaps surprisingly, that elastic scatteringangle dependent collisions are not always effective at damping flavor instabilities
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