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Manuel Goimil-García

Publications and source records attributed to Manuel Goimil-García.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Quasi-steady flavor configuration of multi-energy neutrino ensembles

Neutrino flavor conversion profoundly impacts the explosion mechanism and multi-messenger emissions of core-collapse supernovae. Yet, state-of-the-art hydrodynamic simulations of neutrino-dense astrophysical environments cannot account for neutrino quantum kinetics, necessitating subgrid schemes to model the impact of neutrino self-interaction on the quasi-steady-state flavor configuration. We present semi-analytical approximations for the outcomes of both slow and fast flavor conversions in quasi-homogeneous systems with periodic boundary conditions. Independent of the mass ordering, our ansatz demonstrates excellent agreement with multi-angle and multi-energy solutions of the neutrino kinetic equations across a wide range of representative (anti)neutrino distributions.

astro-ph.HE↗

Steady state of fast-oscillating neutrinos in an inhomogeneous medium

The streaming of neutrinos in an inhomogeneous medium is known to affect the physics of flavor conversion. We employ an ensemble of single-crossed angular distributions and explore the physics of flavor conversion, while neutrinos propagate across a one-dimensional inhomogeneous medium. The advective term in the neutrino equations of motion is responsible for the cascade of flavor waves towards ever smaller spatial and angular scales. However, as the system evolves, perturbations with large wavenumbers are damped, with a resulting smearing of the flavor configuration. We provide a simple recipe that allows to forecast the steady-state flavor configuration achieved by neutrinos without solving their kinetic equations. In particular, we find that flavor equipartition on one side of the angular spectrum and the cancellation of the spectral crossing in the lepton number distributions, proposed in the literature as generic flavor outcome, is a special solution depending on the degree of neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry. This work constitutes a step forward towards the development of semi-analytic schemes to account for flavor conversion physics in hydrodynamic simulations of core-collapse supernovae and neutron-star merger remnants.

astro-ph.HE↗

Fast Flavor Pendulum: Instability Condition

Even in the absence of neutrino masses, a neutrino gas can exhibit a homogeneous flavor instability that leads to a periodic motion known as the fast flavor pendulum. A well-known necessary condition is a crossing of the angular flavor lepton distribution. In an earlier work, some of us showed that homogeneous flavor instabilities also obey a Nyquist criterion, inspired by plasma physics. This condition, while more restrictive than the angular crossing, is only sufficient if the unstable branch of the dispersion relation is bounded by critical points that both lie under the light cone (points with subluminal phase velocity). While the lepton-number angle distribution, assumed to be axially symmetric, easily allows one to determine the real-valued branch of the dispersion relation and to recognize if instead superluminal critical points exist, this graphical method does not translate into a simple instability condition. We discuss the homogeneous mode in the more general context of the dispersion relation for modes with arbitrary wave number and stress that it plays no special role on this continuum, except for its regular but fragile long-term behavior, owed to its many symmetries.

hep-ph↗

Pauli blocking: probing beyond-mean-field effects in neutrino flavor evolution

Neutrino quantum kinetics in dense astrophysical environments is investigated relying on the mean-field approximation. In this paper, we heuristically explore whether beyond-mean-field effects due to neutrino degeneracy could hinder flavor instabilities that are otherwise foreseen. Our results show that these corrections shift the stability regions for a suite of (anti)neutrino ensembles: the flavor conversion of previously unstable distributions can be damped, but angular distributions that are stable in the mean-field case can also become unstable. Our work should serve as a motivation to further investigate the limitations of the mean-field treatment.

astro-ph.HE↗