Numerical and Physical Stability of Supernova Neutrino Flavor Evolution

Understand

This paper examines neutrino flavor evolution outside a supernova neutrinosphere using a one-dimensional model that retains the non-linear nature of neutrino-neutrino interactions as well as some aspects of the full geometry.

• In some limiting cases analytic results can be obtained that display different behavior from their counterparts in (linear) solar neutrino flavor evolution.
• For more general cases, numerical solutions require extended numerical algorithms to achieve stable solutions, and these solutions exhibit standard chaotic behavior.