Three flavor revolution in fast pairwise neutrino conversion

The modeling of fast flavor evolution of neutrinos in dense environments has been traditionally carried out by relying on a two flavor approximation for simplicity. In addition, vacuum mixing has been deemed negligible. For the first time, we highlight that the fast flavor evolution in three flavors is intrinsically different from the one obtained in the two flavor approximation. This is due to the exponential growth of flavor mixing in the e-mu and e-tau sectors generated by the vacuum term in the Hamiltonian. As a result, substantially larger flavor mixing is found in three flavors. Our findings highlight that the two flavor approximation is not justified for fast pairwise conversion, even if the angular distributions of nonelectron type neutrinos are initially identical.

Automated summary

This study highlights that the fast flavor evolution of neutrinos in dense environments in three flavors is fundamentally different from the two flavor approximation, mainly due to the exponential growth of flavor mixing in the e-mu and e-tau sectors generated by the vacuum term in the Hamiltonian. Substantially larger flavor mixing is found in three flavors, suggesting that the two flavor approximation is not suitable for fast pairwise conversion even if the angular distributions of nonelectron neutrinos are initially identical.