Neutrino Cloud Instabilities Just above the Neutrino Sphere of a Supernova

Most treatments of neutrino flavor evolution, above a surface of the last scattering, take identical angular distributions on this surface for the different initial (unmixed) flavors, and for particles and antiparticles. Differences in these distributions must be present, as a result of the species-dependent scattering cross sections lower in the star. These lead to a new set of nonlinear equations, unstable even at the initial surface with respect to perturbations that break all-over spherical symmetry. There could be important consequences for explosion dynamics as well as for the neutrino pulse in the outer regions.