Theoretical Physics Colloquium

The Unravelling of Flavor Coherence

by Prof. Basudeb Dasgupta (TIFR, Mumbai)

Tuesday, November 24, 2020 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Zoom
Description
A supernova natively emits neutrinos and antineutrinos of all flavors with different luminosities and energy spectra. I will show how the different neutrino flavors are brought closer to each other due to irreversible decoherence-like processes occurring at a Tera-Hz rate, determined by the large neutrino density. This new result allows detailed implementation of flavor-dependent neutrino transport in supernova simulations and paves the way for supernova neutrino phenomenology. From a more conceptual perspective, this concrete example will show how collective behaviour can be parametrically faster than that of its constituents, and how "coarse- graining" leads to irreversible "relaxation" even though the microscopic dynamics remains perfectly time-reversal invariant. 

This talk will be based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03337