Neutrino helicity oscillations in astrophysical environments: A many-body approach
Abstract
Neutrino rest mass enables left-handed states to "flip" to right-handed states and vice versa. In-medium effects can enhance the probability for such spin-flip. We demonstrate that a full many-body calculation of this process in neutrino-dense environments can lead to spin-flip probabilities that exceed by orders of magnitude those calculated with mean-field treatments. We study simple configurations with a few neutrinos in well-defined momentum states, for which we show that the helicity conversion enhancement is connected to many-body momentum exchange. Such an effect would therefore be missed in a calculation that considers only forward processes. We speculate on the potential astrophysical implications of these results and the range of applicability of our calculation and its limitations.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{xu2026neutrino,
title = {{Neutrino helicity oscillations in astrophysical environments: A many-body approach}},
author = {Yiheng Xu and Julien Froustey and George M. Fuller and Lukáš Gráf and Amol V. Patwardhan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.31242},
eprint = {2605.31242},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31242},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Neutrino helicity oscillations in astrophysical environments: A many-body approach
AU - Yiheng Xu
AU - Julien Froustey
AU - George M. Fuller
AU - Lukáš Gráf
AU - Amol V. Patwardhan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/15
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.31242
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31242
AB - Neutrino rest mass enables left-handed states to "flip" to right-handed states and vice versa. In-medium effects can enhance the probability for such spin-flip. We demonstrate that a full many-body calculation of this process in neutrino-dense environments can lead to spin-flip probabilities that exceed by orders of magnitude those calculated with mean-field treatments. We study simple configurations with a few neutrinos in well-defined momentum states, for which we show that the helicity conversion enhancement is connected to many-body momentum exchange. Such an effect would therefore be missed in a calculation that considers only forward processes. We speculate on the potential astrophysical implications of these results and the range of applicability of our calculation and its limitations.
ER -