Numerical and physical stability of supernova neutrino flavor evolution

Prospects for Detecting Supernova Neutrino Flavor Oscillations

The neutrinos from a Type II supernova provide perhaps our best opportunity to probe cosmologically interesting muon and/or tauon neutrino masses. This is because matter enhanced neutrino oscillations can lead to an anomalously hot νe spectrum, and thus to enhanced charged current cross sections in terrestrial detectors. Two recently proposed supernova neutrino observatories, OMNIS and LAND, wi...

Neutrino Flavor Conversion in a Supernova Core

If ν µ or ν τ mix with ν e , neutrino oscillations and collisions in a supernova (SN) core allow these flavors effectively to participate in β equilibrium and thus to obtain a large chemical potential. If a sterile species mixes with ν e , these effects lead to an anomalous loss of energy and lepton number. We study flavor conversion in a SN core on the basis of a new kinetic equation which rig...

Resonant Neutrino Spin-Flavor Precession and Supernova Nucleosynthesis and Dynamics

We discuss the effects of resonant spin-flavor precession (RSFP) of Majorana neutrinos on heavy element nucleosynthesis in neutrino-heated supernova ejecta and the dynamics of supernovae. In assessing the effects of RSFP, we explicitly include matter-enhanced (MSW) resonant neutrino flavor conversion effects where appropriate. We point out that for plausible ranges of neutrino magnetic moments ...

Simulating nonlinear neutrino flavor evolution

We discuss a new kind of astrophysical transport problem: the coherent evolution of neutrino flavor in core collapse supernovae. Solution of this problem requires a numerical approach which can simulate accurately the quantum mechanical coupling of intersecting neutrino trajectories and the associated nonlinearity which characterizes neutrino flavor conversion. We describe here the two codes de...

Supernova Neutrino Spectra and Applications to Flavor Oscillations