Symmetry breaking induced by pairwise conversion of neutrinos in compact sources

Abstract

A surprising consequence of non-linear flavor evolution is the spontaneous breaking of the initial symmetries of the neutrino gas propagating in a dense astrophysical environment. We explore the flavor conversion physics by taking into account the polar and azimuthal angular distributions of neutrinos and present the very first example of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the context of fast flavor mixing in the nonlinear regime. Intriguingly, we find that fast flavor mixing does not always develop in the proximity of the angular regions with vanishing electron lepton number, as commonly assumed, and large flavor mixing can rapidly spread through all neutrino modes. Such behavior cannot be predicted from the linear regime of the flavor evolution. These results can have major consequences on the physics of compact astrophysical objects.