arXiv subjects

Rasmus S. L. Hansen

Publications and source records attributed to Rasmus S. L. Hansen.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Enhancement or damping of fast neutrino flavor conversions due to collisions

Fast neutrino flavor conversion can occur in core-collapse supernovae or compact binary merger remnants when non-forward collisions are also at play, and neutrinos are not fully decoupled from matter. This work aims to shed light on the conditions under which fast flavor conversion is enhanced or suppressed by collisions. By relying on a neutrino toy model with three angular bins in the absence of spatial inhomogeneities, we consider two angular configurations: The first one with angular distributions of $ν_e$ and $\barν_e$ that are almost isotropic as expected before complete neutrino decoupling and showing little flavor conversion when collisions are absent. The second one with angular distributions of $ν_e$ and $\barν_e$ that are forward peaked as expected in the free-streaming regime and showing significant flavor conversion in the absence of collisions. By including angle-independent, direction-changing collisions, we find that collisions are responsible for an overall enhancement (damping) of flavor conversion in the former (latter) angular configuration. These opposite outcomes are due to the non-trivial interplay between collisions, flavor conversion, and the initial angular distributions of the electron type neutrinos. The enhancement in neutrino flavor conversion is found to be anticorrelated with the magnitude of flavor conversions in the absence of collisions.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2022

Triangulating Black Hole Forming Stellar Collapses through Neutrinos

In the event of a black hole (BH) forming stellar collapse, the neutrino signal should terminate abruptly at the moment of BH formation, after a phase of steady accretion. Since neutrinos are expected to reach Earth hours before the electromagnetic signal, the combined detection of the neutrino burst through multiple neutrino telescopes could allow to promptly determine the angular location of a nearby stellar collapse in the sky with high precision. In this paper, we contrast the triangulation pointing procedure that relies on the rise time of the neutrino curve, often considered in the literature, to the one that takes advantage of the cutoff of the neutrino curve at the moment of BH formation. By forecasting the neutrino signal expected in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE, we devise a strategy to optimize the identification of the rise and cutoff time of the neutrino curve. We show that the triangulation method developed by employing the end tail of the neutrino curve allows to achieve at least one order of magnitude improvement in the pointing precision for a galactic burst, while being insensitive to the neutrino mixing scenario. The triangulation pointing method based on the cutoff of the neutrino curve will also guarantee a better performance for BH forming collapses occurring beyond our own Galaxy.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2021

Neutrino flavor mixing breaks isotropy in the early universe

The neutrino field is commonly assumed to be isotropic and homogeneous in the early universe. However, due to the large neutrino density, a small perturbation of the isotropy of the neutrino field could potentially be amplified by the non-linear flavor mixing caused by neutrino self-interactions. We carry out the first numerical simulations of the neutrino flavor evolution in a multi-angle anisotropic setting. Due to the computational challenges involved, we adopt a simplified framework consisting of a homogeneous universe with two angle bins -- left and right moving modes -- for neutrinos and antineutrinos, together with an approximate form for the collision term which goes beyond the commonly adopted damping approximation. By assuming a small initial left-right asymmetry of $\mathcal{O}(10^{-15})$, we convincingly demonstrate that flavor evolution can be affected in both mass orderings, with implications on the effective number of thermally excited neutrino species ($N_{\mathrm{eff}}$). Notably, the correction to $N_{\rm eff}$ is comparable to higher order corrections from finite temperature QED effects in normal ordering. In addition, by assuming an initial lepton asymmetry in the neutrino sector of the same order as the baryon one [$\mathcal{O}(10^{-9})$], we find that the neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry grows by several orders of magnitude for isotropic as well as anisotropic initial conditions. This work clearly shows that it is imperative to critically revisit standard assumptions concerning neutrino flavor mixing in the early universe, especially in the light of possible implications on the cosmological observables.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Timing the Neutrino Signal of a Galactic Supernova

We study several methods for timing the neutrino signal of a Galactic supernova (SN) for different detectors via Monte Carlo simulations. We find that, for the methods we studied, at a distance of $10\,$kpc both Hyper-Kamiokande and IceCube can reach precisions of $\sim1\,$ms for the neutrino burst, while a potential IceCube Gen2 upgrade will reach submillisecond precision. In the case of a failed SN, we find that detectors such as SK and JUNO can reach precisions of $\sim0.1\,$ms while HK could potentially reach a resolution of $\sim 0.01\,$ms so that the impact of the black hole formation process itself becomes relevant. Two possible applications for this are the triangulation of a (failed) SN as well as the possibility to constrain neutrino masses via a time-of-flight measurement using a potential gravitational wave signal as reference.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

MeV-scale reheating temperature and cosmological production of light sterile neutrinos

We investigate how sterile neutrinos with a range of masses influence cosmology in MeV-scale reheating temperature scenarios. By computing the production of sterile neutrinos through the combination of mixing and scattering in the early Universe, we find that light sterile neutrinos, with masses and mixings as inferred from short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, are consistent with big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation for the reheating temperature of ${\cal O}(1)$ MeV if the parent particle responsible for reheating decays into electromagnetic components (radiative decay). In contrast, if the parent particle mainly decays into hadrons (hadronic decay), the bound from BBN becomes more stringent. In this case, the existence of the light sterile neutrinos can be cosmologically excluded, depending on the mass and the hadronic branching ratio of the parent particle.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

MeV-scale reheating temperature and thermalization of oscillating neutrinos by radiative and hadronic decays of massive particles

From a theoretical point of view, there is a strong motivation to consider an MeV-scale reheating temperature induced by long-lived massive particles with masses around the weak scale, decaying only through gravitational interaction. In this study, we investigate lower limits on the reheating temperature imposed by big-bang nucleosynthesis assuming both radiative and hadronic decays of such massive particles. For the first time, effects of neutrino self-interactions and oscillations are taken into account in the neutrino thermalization calculations. By requiring consistency between theoretical and observational values of light element abundances, we find that the reheating temperature should conservatively be $T_{\rm RH} \gtrsim 1.8$ MeV in the case of the 100% radiative decay, and $T_{\rm RH} \gtrsim$ 4-5 MeV in the case of the 100% hadronic decays for particle masses in the range of 10 GeV to 100 TeV.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

Effect of extended neutrino production region on collective oscillations in supernovae

In supernovae neutrinos are emitted from a region with a width $r_{\rm eff}$ of a few kilometers (rather than from a surface of infinitesimal width). We study the effect of integration (averaging) over such an extended emission region on collective oscillations. The averaging leads to additional suppression of the correlation (off-diagonal element of the density matrix) by a factor $ \sim 1/r_{\rm eff} V_e \sim 10^{-10}$, where $V_e$ is the matter potential. This factor enters the initial condition for further collective oscillations and, consequently, leads to a delay of the strong flavour transitions. We justify and quantify this picture using a simple example of collective effects in two intersecting fluxes. We have derived the evolution equation for the density matrix elements integrated over the emission region and solved it both numerically and analytically. For the analytic solution we have used linearized equations. We show that the delay of the development of the instability and the collective oscillations depends on the suppression factor due to the averaging (integration) logarithmically. If the instability develops inside the production region, the integration leads not only to a delay but also to a modification of the exponential grow.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

Stability of three neutrino flavor conversion in supernovae

Neutrino-neutrino interactions can lead to collective flavor conversion in the dense parts of a core collapse supernova. Growing instabilities that lead to collective conversions have been studied intensely in the limit of two-neutrino species and occur for inverted mass ordering in the case of a perfectly spherical supernova. We examine two simple models of colliding and intersecting neutrino beams and show, that for three neutrino species instabilities exist also for normal mass ordering even in the case of a fully symmetric system. Whereas the instability for inverted mass ordering is associated with $Δm_{31}^2$, the new instability we find for normal mass ordering is associated with $Δm_{21}^2$. As a consequence, the growth rate of these new instabilities for normal ordering is smaller by about an order of magnitude compared to the rates of the well studied case of inverted ordering.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2019

IceCube Flavor Ratios with Identified Astrophysical Sources: Towards Improving New Physics Testability

Motivated by the discovery of the first high-energy astrophysical neutrino source, the blazar TXS 0506+056, we revisit the IceCube flavor ratio analysis. Assuming large statistics from identified blazars, collected in the forthcoming years by the IceCube detector and its successor IceCube-Gen2, we demonstrate that the constraints on several new physics scenarios in which the baseline dependent terms in neutrino oscillation probabilities are not averaged, can be improved. As a representative case, we consider pseudo-Dirac neutrinos while neutrino decay is also discussed.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2018

Neutrino conversion in a neutrino flux: Towards an effective theory of collective oscillations

Collective oscillations of supernova neutrinos above the neutrino sphere can be completely described by the propagation of individual neutrinos in external potentials and are in this sense a linear phenomenon. An effective theory of collective oscillations can be developed based on certain assumptions about time dependence of these potentials. General conditions for strong flavor transformations are formulated and these transformations can be interpreted as parametric resonance effects induced by periodic modulations of the potentials. We study a simplified and solvable example, where a probe neutrino is propagating in a flux of collinear neutrinos, such that $νν-$ interactions in the flux are absent. Still, this example retains the main feature - the coherent flavor exchange. Properties of the parametric resonance are studied, and it is shown that integrations over energies and emission points of the flux neutrinos suppress modulations of the potentials and therefore strong transformations. The transformations are also suppressed by changes in densities of background neutrinos and electrons.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2018

Thermalizing sterile neutrino dark matter

Sterile neutrinos produced through oscillations are a well motivated dark matter candidate, but recent constraints from observations have ruled out most of the parameter space. We analyze the impact of new interactions on the evolution of keV sterile neutrino dark matter in the early Universe. Based on general considerations we find a mechanism which thermalizes the sterile neutrinos after an initial production by oscillations. The thermalization of sterile neutrinos is accompanied by dark entropy production which increases the yield of dark matter and leads to a lower characteristic momentum. This resolves the growing tensions with structure formation and X-ray observations and even revives simple non-resonant production as a viable way to produce sterile neutrino dark matter. We investigate the parameters required for the realization of the thermalization mechanism in a representative model and find that a simple estimate based on energy- and entropy conservation describes the mechanism well.

hep-ph↗