Quantum many-body equilibration of fast neutrino flavor oscillations
Joshua Martin, Los Alamos National Laboratory
In hot and dense astrophysical environments, neutrinos are emitted in such numbers that their flavor content is expected to have an appreciable effect on the local system’s dynamic and chemical evolution. In this work, we consider such a gas in the regime for which neutrino- neutrino coherent forward scattering dominates the flavor evolution. We show evidence that the generic potential induced by this effect is non-integrable and that the statistics of its energy level spaces are in good agreement with the Wigner surmise. We also find that individual neutrinos rapidly entangle with all of the others present which results in a dynamic equilibration of the flavor content of individual neutrinos. We show that the average neutrino flavor content can be predicted utilizing a thermodynamic partition function.