Many-body collective neutrino oscillations: recent developments

Understand

Neutrino flavor transformations in core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers represent a complex and unsolved problem that is integral to our understanding of the dynamics and nucleosynthesis in these environments.

• The high number densities of neutrinos present in these environments can engender various collective effects in neutrino flavor transformations, driven either by neutrino-neutrino coherent scattering, or in some cases, through collisional (incoherent) interactions.
• An ensemble of neutrinos undergoing coherent scattering among themselves is an interacting quantum many-body system -- as such, there is a tantalising prospect of quantum entanglement developing between the neutrinos, which can leave imprints on their flavor evolution histories.
• Here, we seek to summarize recent progress that has been made towards understanding this phenomenon.