Neutrino quantum kinetics

By A. Vlasenko, G. Fuller, V. Cirigliano. 2013

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a formulation of the quantum kinetic equations (QKEs), which govern the evolution of neutrino flavor at high density and temperature. Here, the structure of the QKEs is derived from the ground up, using fundamental neutrino interactions and quantum field theory. We show that the resulting QKEs describe coherent flavor evolution with an effective mass when inelastic scattering is negligible. The QKEs also contain a collision term. This term can reduce to the collision term in the Boltzmann equation when scattering is dominant and the neutrino effective masses and density matrices become diagonal in the interaction basis. We also find that the QKEs include equations of motion for a new dynamical quantity related to neutrino spin. This quantity decouples from the equations of motion for the density matrices at low densities or in isotropic conditions. However, the spin equations of motion allow for the possibility of coherent transformation between neutrinos and antineutrinos at high densities and in the presence of anisotropy. Although the requisite conditions for this exist in the core collapse supernova and compact object merger environments, it is likely that only a self-consistent incorporation of the QKEs in a sufficiently realistic model could establish whether or not significant neutrino-antineutrino conversion occurs. © 2014 American Physical Society.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9661c6bea685e2363a21bcd4c011e1f02766d4d

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. M. Volpe
2. Julien Froustey
3. C. Pitrou
4. S. Horiuchi
5. J. Kneller

Citations in the corpus

• Collective neutrino flavor conversion: Recent developments (2016, unknown): “, we work on the lowest level of the BBGKY hierarchy and in addition we ignore spin and pairing correlations [43–47].”
• What can be learned from a future supernova neutrino detection (2017, methodology): “The flavour evolution of the neutrinos is a quantum mechanical problem whose most general formulation has been described by a set of Quantum Kinetic Equations [215, 216].”
• Neutrino decoupling including flavour oscillations and primordial nucleosynthesis (2020, background): “, a perturbative expansion of the density matrix [21], or the ClosedTime-Path (CTP) formalism for the two-point function [22, 23].”