On the Occurrence of Crossings between the Angular Distributions of Electron Neutrinos and Antineutrinos in the Supernova Core

Abstract

Abstract Neutrino fast pairwise conversions have been postulated to occur in the dense core of a core-collapse supernova (SN), possibly having dramatic consequences on the SN mechanism and the observable neutrino signal. One crucial condition favoring pairwise conversions is the presence of crossings between the electron neutrino and antineutrino angular distributions (i.e., electron neutrino lepton number crossings, ELN crossings). A stationary and spherically symmetric SN toy model is constructed to reproduce the development of the neutrino angular distributions in the dense SN core in the absence of perturbations induced by hydrodynamical instabilities. By iteratively solving the neutrino Boltzmann equations including the collisional term, our model predicts that ELN crossings can develop only in the proximity of the decoupling region and for a sharp radial evolution of the baryon density, when the electron neutrino and antineutrino number densities are comparable. Such conditions are likely to occur only in the late SN stages. Interestingly, flavor instabilities induced by spatial or temporal perturbations are unlikely to generate ELN crossings dynamically within our simplified setup.