Speaker: Michael Cervia, Physics PhD Graduate Student
Abstract: The neutrino-neutrino interaction is a tree-level process of the Standard Model that is still yet to be observed. Moreover, in tandem with vacuum flavor oscillations and given a sufficiently large density of neutrinos, this interaction can substantially impact the flavor content of the neutrino ensemble – an interplay of one- and two-body neutrino behavior known as “collective neutrino oscillations.” While mean-field approximations have been used to gather a basic intuition for the collective behavior of a neutrino ensemble, little is known about how particle correlations scale with the size of the neutrino ensemble for realistic physical parameters in environments such as supernovae (SNe) and the Early Universe (EU). We therefore present a many-body approach to studying collective neutrino interactions in two flavors (i.e., e and x) for the forward scattering of N neutrinos. We present results for N~10 and discuss implications of our work for observable corrections to mean-field predictions of neutrino flavor spectra in SNe fluxes and nuclear isotope abundances.
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