90th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Section of the APS
Thursday–Saturday, November 9–11, 2023;
Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, Kentucky
Session B02: Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Gravitation I
10:30 AM–12:06 PM,
Thursday, November 9, 2023
Keen Johnson
Room: East Room
Chair: Bartosz Fornal, Barry University
Abstract: B02.00003 : Many-body effects in Collective Neutrino Oscillations in Core-Collapse Supernovae.
11:30 AM–11:42 AM
Abstract
Presenter:
Zoha Laraib
(University of Tennessee, Knoxville.)
Author:
Zoha Laraib
(University of Tennessee, Knoxville.)
The quantum mechanics of neutrino flavor transformation can determine whether a massive star explodes and what kind of elements are formed in its ejecta. The energy deposited by the neutrinos and their flavor composition can affect the amount of fallback material onto Neutron star/ blackhole, directing us to explore if some neutrino configurations can generate substantially more entanglement during the neutrino oscillations in the dynamics. This could eventually impact explosion mechanism and the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements of core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) primarily through the n/p ratio in their beta decay reactions in the core, potentially influencing the final mass of the compact object. Recent studies on out-of-equilibrium neutrinos dynamics have shown that many-body correlations can trigger collective neutrino oscillations if appropriate initial conditions are present. We simulate many-body quantum mechanics of neutrinos in a problem representative of instabilities that occur in neutrino dense astrophysical environments like that of CCSNe in order to determine whether many-body solutions are significantly different from mean-field solutions which include no entanglement. But since the Hilbert space of interacting neutrinos in nf flavors has dimension (nf)N for N particles, this many-body system becomes highly nonlinear with system size making it a complex problem to solve. To understand entanglement via a full many-body treatment a neutrino plasma instability dubbed the ”Fast Flavor Instability” (FFI) has been identified as having the potential to change the outcome of a core- collapse supernova by rapidly changing neutrino flavor. Current neutrino many-body calculations assume infinite homogeneity and isotropic conditions, while exploding stars and the FFI are notably inhomogeneous. To encounter the real inhomogeneous growth of FFI, we give each neutrino a finite size governed by a shape function that would determine the strength of neutrino self-interactions in the CCSNe system that includes quantum entanglement. The results could close a significant hole in the theory of how neutrinos drive the explosion of massive stars and the generation of heavy elements in the universe.