Plasma Instabilities Due to Coupling Between Ion Acoustic Waves and Neutrino Oscillations

Abstract

Neutrino flavor oscillations refer to the change of flavor of a neutrino that was created with a specific flavor. Intense neutrino beams are present in astrophysical plasmas and are responsible for various phenomena such as heating of type II supernovae. The investigation of neutrino properties is a most relevant issue in context of elementary particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics. The confirmation of neutrino masses and flavor oscillations draw attention towards the incompleteness of the standard model and call for a new description of nature. Since the ion acoustic waves as well as neutrino flavor oscillations are both slow in character, the coupling between neutrino and plasma oscillations is a very interesting phenomenon to investigate. The intense interactions between IAWs and flavor oscillations give rise to plasma instabilities. Such an instability may be a suitable mechanism for supernova explosions that are an abundant source of neutrinos. Recently reported investigations have illustrated the growth rate of linear plasma instabilities while considering the neutrino mass oscillation model linked to the neutrino-plasma coupling model in a usual electron-ion plasma. However, the different types of plasma instabilities arising due to coupling of slow mode waves and neutrino flavor oscillations in magnetized, dense plasmas have not been fully scrutinized. Our aim is to remove this lacuna and investigate the plasma instabilities such as Jeans instability, while taking into account the breakthrough discovery of neutrino flavor oscillations. The findings of present investigation may give interesting physical insights into the complex astrophysical phenomenon in dense plasmas of stellar, white dwarf, red giant, and supernova stars.