466 research outputs found
Invariants of Collective Neutrino Oscillations
We consider the flavor evolution of a dense neutrino gas by taking into
account both vacuum oscillations and self interactions of neutrinos. We examine
the system from a many-body perspective as well as from the point of view of an
effective one-body description formulated in terms of the neutrino polarization
vectors. We show that, in the single angle approximation, both the many-body
picture and the effective one-particle picture possess several constants of
motion. We write down these constants of motion explicitly in terms of the
neutrino isospin operators for the many-body case and in terms of the
polarization vectors for the effective one-body case. The existence of these
constants of motion is a direct consequence of the fact that the collective
neutrino oscillation Hamiltonian belongs to the class of Gaudin Hamiltonians.
This class of Hamiltonians also includes the (reduced) BCS pairing Hamiltonian
describing superconductivity. We point out the similarity between the
collective neutrino oscillation Hamiltonian and the BCS pairing Hamiltonian.
The constants of motion manifest the exact solvability of the system. Borrowing
the well established techniques of calculating the exact BCS spectrum, we
present exact eigenstates and eigenvalues of both the many-body and the
effective one-particle Hamiltonians describing the collective neutrino
oscillations. For the effective one-body case, we show that spectral splits of
neutrinos can be understood in terms of the adiabatic evolution of some
quasi-particle degrees of freedom from a high density region where they
coincide with flavor eigenstates to the vacuum where they coincide with mass
eigenstates. We write down the most general consistency equations which should
be satisfied by the effective one-body eigenstates and show that they reduce to
the spectral split consistency equations for the appropriate initial
conditions.Comment: 26 pages with one figure. Published versio
A Simultaneous Solution to the ^6Li and ^7Li Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Problems from a Long-Lived Negatively-Charged Leptonic Particle
The Li abundance observed in metal poor halo stars exhibits a plateau
similar to that for Li suggesting a primordial origin. However, the
observed abundance of Li is a factor of larger and that of Li is
a factor of 3 lower than the abundances predicted in the standard big bang when
the baryon-to-photon ratio is fixed by WMAP. Here we show that both of these
abundance anomalies can be explained by the existence of a long-lived massive,
negatively-charged leptonic particle during nucleosynthesis. Such particles
would capture onto the synthesized nuclei thereby reducing the reaction Coulomb
barriers and opening new transfer reaction possibilities, and catalyzing a
second round of big bang nucleosynthesis. This novel solution to both of the Li
problems can be achieved with or without the additional effects of stellar
destruction.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, to be published in Physical Review
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