On the Observability of Collective Flavor Oscillations in Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background

Understand

Collective flavor oscillations are known to bring multiple splits in the supernova (SN) neutrino and antineutrino spectra.

• These spectral splits depend not only on the mass hierarchy of the neutrinos but also on the initial relative flux composition.
• Observation of spectral splits in a future galactic supernova signal is expected to throw light on the mass hierarchy pattern of the neutrinos.
• However, since the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB) comprises of a superposition of neutrino fluxes from all past supernovae, and since different supernovae are expected to have slightly different initial fluxes, it is pertinent to check if the hierarchy dependent signature of collective oscillations can survive this averaging of the flux spectra.