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Neutrino flavor evolution in high-flux astrophysical environments

J. Carlson1, A. Roggero2,3, and Duff Neill1

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 103015 – Published 10 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/dds1-t759

Abstract

We examine neutrino evolution in astrophysical environments where the neutrino flux is very large, including core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers. In these environments, the neutrino-neutrino and neutrino-antineutrino interactions are crucial. We include nonforward scattering of neutrinos and antineutrinos in a semiclassical treatment. Because of the large scale of neutrino momenta (2–10 MeV), the quantum evolution problem can be treated as a sum over incoherent paths in the momentum and flavor of each neutrino. The phases between different neutrinos are essentially random because of the large kinetic terms. Momentum is conserved at each vertex, and important flavor symmetries are retained. Dynamics in the many-body neutrino system enable rapid equilibration in the energy and angular distributions of all flavors, and an equilibration of products of neutrino and antineutrino densities for each flavor at either large or zero background matter density. We also describe the evolution at moderate densities where the mass eigenstates differ for neutrinos and antineutrinos, and with time-varying background matter densities. The evolution maintains relevant symmetries and reduces to standard Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein oscillations in the appropriate limits. The rapid equilibration in energy and flavor can significantly impact energy deposition and nucleosynthesis in high-flux astrophysical environments, and potentially flavor energy relations in terrestrial supernovae neutrino observations.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 103015– Published 10 November, 2026
  • Received 13 May 2026
  • Accepted 25 September 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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