Entanglement and collective flavor oscillations in a dense neutrino gas

• Main Authors: Cervia, Michael J, Patwardhan, Amol V, Balantekin, A. B, Coppersmith, S. N, Johnson, Calvin W
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 08-10-2019
• Subjects: Physics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; Physics - High Energy Physics - Phenomenology; Physics - Nuclear Theory; Physics - Quantum Physics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1908.03511

Phys. Rev. D 100, 083001 (2019) We investigate the importance of going beyond the mean-field approximation in
the dynamics of collective neutrino oscillations. To expand our understanding
of the coherent neutrino oscillation problem, we apply concepts from many-body
physics and quantum information theory. Specifically, we use measures of
nontrivial correlations (otherwise known as "entanglement") between the
constituent neutrinos of the many-body system, such as the entanglement entropy
and the Bloch vector of the reduced density matrix. The relevance of going
beyond the mean field is demonstrated by comparisons between the evolution of
the neutrino state in the many-body picture vs the mean-field limit, for
different initial conditions.