Examining Neutrino Interactions with Quantum Kinetics and Quantum Information
Student:
TBD
Mentors:
Vincenzo Cirigliano (INSPIRE-HEP, email: cirigv@uw.edu)
Michael J. Cervia (INSPIRE-HEP, email: cervia@uw.edu)
Prerequisites:
Students will need an introduction to classical and quantum statistical mechanics, and some basic programming experience will be helpful but not required.
What Students Will Learn:
Students will learn about neutrino physics in astrophysical settings like core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers, how concepts like quantum entanglement can come into play with nuclear and particle physics, and how to write/use a program to evolve many-body systems.
Expected Project Length:
One year
Project Description:
Neutrino-neutrino interactions are predicted by the Standard Model, though not yet observed experimentally. On the other hand, neutrinos are known from experiments to come in three flavors, each of which is a quantum superposition of three mass states of neutrinos [1]. This mismatch between flavor and mass manifests as vacuum flavor oscillations, where, for example, an electron flavor neutrino traveling through empty space can be observed later as having a different flavor with some probability.
We now expect that when neutrinos are densely packed (say, 1058 within a 100 km radius), they can interact enough with one another such that they undergo much stronger, collective oscillations in their flavor [2]. Modeling this behavior becomes a problem in many-body physics. An open question is how the size of the neutrino’s quantum wave packet impacts the results we obtain when simulating this problem [3]. In particular with this project, we will try to understand how much entanglement can build up when a neutrino’s wave packet is larger or smaller.
References:
[1] Carlo Giunti and Chung W. Kim. Fundamentals of Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics. Oxford University Press, April 2007.
[2] Huaiyu Duan, George M. Fuller, and Yong-Zhong Qian. Collective neutrino oscillations. Ann. Rev. Nucl. and Part. Sci., 60:569–594, 2010.
[3] Shashank Shalgar and Irene Tamborra. Do we have enough evidence to invalidate the mean-field approximation adopted to model collective neutrino oscillations? Phys. Rev. D, 107:123004, 2023.
[4] Dana Berry. Earth’s gold came from colliding dead stars, 2013. [Online; accessed Dec 16, 2024].
[5] John Cherry. Neutrino flavor transformation in core-collapse supernovae. PhD thesis, University of California-San Diego, 2012.