Construction and analysis of a simplified many-body neutrino model

Abstract

In dense neutrino systems, such as found in the early Universe, or near a supernova core, neutrino flavor evolution is affected by coherent neutrino-neutrino scattering. It has been recently suggested that many-particle quantum entanglement effects may play an essential role in these systems, potentially invalidating the traditional description in terms of a set of single-particle evolution equations. We model the neutrino system by a system of interacting spins, following an earlier work which showed that such a spin system can in some cases be solved exactly. We extend this work by constructing an exact analytical solution to a more general spin system, including initial states with asymmetric spin distribution and, moreover, not necessarily aligned along the same axis. Our solution exhibits a rich set of behaviors, including coherent oscillations and dephasing and a transition from the classical to quantum regimes. We argue that the classical evolution of the spin system captures the entire coherent behavior of the neutrino system, while the quantum effects in the spin system capture some, but not all, of the neutrino incoherent evolution. By comparing the spin and neutrino systems, we find no evidence for the violation of the accepted one-body description, though the argument involves some subtleties not appreciated before. The analysis in this paper may apply to other two-state systems beyond the neutrino field.