SN1987A neutrino burst: limits on flavor conversion

Understand

In this paper, we revisit the SN1987A neutrino data to see its constraints on flavor conversion.

• We are motivated by the fact that most works that analyze this data consider a specific conversion mechanism, such as the MSW (Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein) effect, although flavor conversion is still an open question in supernovae due to the presence of neutrino-neutrino interactions.
• In our analysis, instead of considering a specific conversion mechanism, we let the electron antineutrino survival probability $P_{\overline{e}\overline{e}}$ be a free parameter.
• We fit the data from Kamiokande-II, Baksan, and IMB detected spectrum with two classes of models: time-integrated and time-dependent.