Time of flight and supernova progenitor effects on the neutrino halo
Time of flight and supernova progenitor effects on the neutrino halo
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Abstract
We argue that the neutrino halo, a population of neutrinos that have undergone direction-changing scattering in the stellar envelope of a core-collapse supernova (CCSNe), is sensitive to neutrino emission history through time of flight. We show that the constant time approximation, commonly used in calculating the neutrino halo, does not capture the spatiotemporal evolution of the halo neutrino population and that correcting for time of flight can produce conditions which may trigger fast neutrino flavor conversion. We also find that there exists a window of time early in all CCSNe where the neutrino halo population is sufficiently small that it may be negligible. This suggests that collective neutrino oscillation calculations which neglect the halo may be well founded at sufficiently early times.
