NEutrino flavor Plasma: TUrbuleNt evolution in astrophysical Explosions

Ziel

This project will develop a first-principles wave-kinetic theory of collective flavor conversions (CFCs), recasting them as a form of flavor turbulence in the neutrino plasma of supernovae and neutron star mergers. In these transients, neutrinos are the dominant energy carriers, and their flavor composition directly impacts energy deposition and nucleosynthesis. Deep in the core, neutrinos interact via the coherent weak field they source, triggering CFCs that can reshape the explosion mechanism and the emerging neutrino signal. CFCs arise from flavor instabilities — the weak-interaction analogue of plasma turbulence — and generate flavor waves that oscillate on picosecond scales, vastly shorter than any other process in extreme transients. This staggering multiscale structure makes direct simulation unfeasible.

To overcome this impasse, I will build a wave-kinetic framework based on the recent identification of flavor waves as a new collective excitation: the flavomon. The novel neutrino-flavomon equations describe the evolution of flavor waves without resolving their microscopic structure, capturing nonlocal and nonlinear dynamics efficiently. By the end of the project, the neutrino–flavomon formalism — now at the conceptual stage of 1950s plasma theory — will be elevated into a predictive, practical tool to decode the next galactic supernova and probe fundamental physics in the Universe’s most extreme environments.