Muon-induced collisional flavor instability in core-collapse supernova

Understand

Neutrinos are known to undergo flavor conversion among their three flavors.

• In the theoretical modeling of core-collapse supernova (CCSN), there has been a great deal of attention to recent discoveries of a new type of neutrino flavor conversions, namely collisional flavor instability (CFI), in which the instability is induced by the flavor-dependent decoherence due to the disparity of neutrino-matter interactions among flavors.
• In this paper, we study how the appearance of on-shell muons and associated neutrino-matter interactions can impact CFIs based on linear stability analysis of flavor conversions.
• Some striking results emerge from the present study.