Particle Physics in Media

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

The work proposed by the PI lies at the intersection of astrophysics, particle physics and many-body theory. It is in three main areas, neutrino physics in a dense medium, electron-positron pair plasmas, and processes in plasmas in strong magnetic fields. The PI proposes to work on the effects of neutrino-neutrino interactions on neutrino propagation in dense astrophysical media such as core collapse supernovae. The PI has found a new type of instability in neutrino-neutrino coherent forward flavor-changing interactions which allows to trade flavor at a rate faster than ordinary oscillations between neutrinos with different angular distributions and energy spectra. This could help equalize the energy spectra of the three flavors that emanate from the neutrino sphere of a supernova. The PI proposes to parameterize the angle and energy distributions of the different neutrino and antineutrino flavors to allow this instability to be studied in large scale simulations. The PI will study electron-positron pair (and photon) relativistic plasma created by neutrinos near a black hole in the last minutes of a black hole- neutron star merger. The PI also proposes to study processes in plasmas in strong magnetic fields using methods of many body quantum field theory. The broader impacts of this research are that Neutrino-neutrino interactions are expected to play a very important role in core-collapse supernovae. Since such supernovae are one of the proposed sites of r-process nucleosynthesis,. The results of this research could potentially impact our understanding of the origin of elements.