Pauli blocking: probing beyond-mean-field effects in neutrino flavor evolution

Abstract

Neutrino quantum kinetics in dense astrophysical environments is investigated relying on the mean-field approximation. In this paper, we heuristically explore whether beyond-mean-field effects due to neutrino degeneracy could hinder flavor instabilities that are otherwise foreseen. Our results show that these corrections shift the stability regions for a suite of (anti)neutrino ensembles: the flavor conversion of previously unstable distributions can be damped, but angular distributions that are stable in the mean-field case can also become unstable. Our work should serve as a motivation to further investigate the limitations of the mean-field treatment.

Comments: 12 pages, including 9 figures. Clarifying text added; conclusions unchanged. Matches version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D