Collisional flavor swap with neutrino self-interactions
C. Kato, Hiroki Nagakura, Lucas Johns
Abstract
Neutrinos play pivotal roles in determining fluid dynamics, nucleosynthesis, and their observables in core-collapse supernova (CCSN) and binary neutron star merger (BNSM). In this paper, we present a novel phenomenon, collisional flavor swap, in which neutrino-matter interactions trigger the complete interchange of neutrino spectra between two different flavors, aided by neutrino self-interactions. We find that a necessary condition to trigger the collisional swap is occurrences of resonancelike collisional flavor instability. In cases where neutrino self-interactions substantially dominate over the collision rate, the collisional swap occurs in the entire neutrino energy spectrum, while intriguing energy-dependent features can emerge after the completion of flavor swap. Since flavor swaps correspond to the most extreme case in flavor conversions, they have a great potential to affect CCSN and BNSM phenomena.