Collisional flavor instability in dense neutrino gases

Abstract

Charged-current neutrino processes such as ${\nu }_e+n\rightleftharpoons p+e^{-}$ and ${\bar{\nu }}_e+p\rightleftharpoons n+e^{+}$ destroy the flavor coherence among the weak-interaction states of a single neutrino and thus damp its flavor oscillation. In a dense neutrino gas such as that inside a core-collapse supernova or the black hole accretion disk formed in a compact binary merger, however, these "collision" processes can trigger large flavor conversion in cooperation with the strong neutrino-neutrino refraction. We show that there exist two types of collisional flavor instability in a homogeneous and isotropic neutrino gas which are identified by the dependence of their real frequencies on the neutrino density $n_{\nu }$. The instability transitions from one type to the other and exhibits a resonance-like behavior in the region where the net electron lepton number of the neutrino gas is negligible. In the transition region, the flavor instability grows exponentially at a rate $\propto n_{\nu }^{1/2}$. We find that the neutrino gas in the black hole accretion disk is susceptible to the collision-induced flavor conversion where the neutrino densities are the highest. As a result, large amounts of heavy-lepton flavor neutrinos may be produced through flavor conversion, which can potentially have important ramifications in the subsequent evolution of the remnant.

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figures. Minor changes to match the published version