Mu-Tau Neutrinos: Influencing Fast Flavor Conversions in Supernovae

Neutrinos in a core-collapse supernova can undergo fast flavor conversions with a possible impact on the explosion mechanism and nucleosynthesis. We perform the first nonlinear simulations of fast conversions in the presence of three neutrino flavors. The recent supernova simulations with muon production call for such an analysis, as they relax the standard nu(mu,tau) = (nu) over bar (mu,tau) (two-flavor) assumption. Our results show the significance of muon and tau lepton number angular distributions, together with the traditional electron lepton number ones. Indeed, our three-flavor results are potentially very different from two-flavor ones. These results strengthen the need to further investigate the occurrence of fast conversions in supernova simulation data, including the degeneracy breaking of mu and tau neutrinos.