Neutrino Fast Flavor Instability in three dimensions for a Neutron Star Merger

Understand

The flavor evolution of neutrinos in core collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers is a critically important unsolved problem in astrophysics.

• Following the electron flavor evolution of the neutrino system is essential for calculating the thermodynamics of compact objects as well as the chemical elements they produce.
• Accurately accounting for flavor transformation in these environments is challenging for a number of reasons, including the large number of neutrinos involved, the small spatial scale of the oscillation, and the nonlinearity of the system.
• We take a step in addressing these issues by presenting a method which describes the neutrino fields in terms of angular moments.