SPACE seminar: Damiano F. G. Fiorillo - "Neutrino plasma: a new state of matter"

Tuesday 3 Mar 2026, 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Rome

Aula 4 (San Marcellino)

Speaker: Dr. Damiano F. G. Fiorillo (INFN, Napoli)

Abstract: Core-collapse supernovae host the densest neutrino environments in the Universe. In these extreme conditions, neutrinos exchange flavor with each other more rapidly than they stream out of the star, forming a collective many-body system whose dynamics are dominated by weak interactions. In this talk, I will present a unified theoretical framework showing that this system behaves as a neutrino plasma, supporting collective flavor-wave excitations—flavomons—that are the exact analogs of collective electromagnetic fields in ordinary plasmas [1]. The stimulated emission of flavomons produces an instability, with consequent restructuring of the neutrino flavor distribution which impacts the supernova explosion and multi-messenger signature. I will show that the conditions for triggering these instabilities naturally descend from detailed balance of neutrino-flavomon interactions [2]. By this approach, I will show that the accretion-powered neutrino outflow of supernovae generically develops neutrino-mass-induced instabilities immediately after the neutronization burst [3].

References:

1. Damiano F. G. Fiorillo, Georg G. Raffelt, Collective Flavor Conversions Are Interactions of Neutrinos with Quantized Flavor Waves, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134 (2025) 21, 21, arXiv:2502.06935 [hep-ph]
2. Damiano F. G. Fiorillo, Georg G. Raffelt, Lepton-Number Crossings are Insufficient for Flavor Instabilities, Phys. Rev. Lett. 136 (2026) 5, 5, arXiv:2507.22987 [hep-ph]
3. Damiano F. G. Fiorillo, Hans T. Janka, Georg G. Raffelt, Neutrino-Mass-Driven Instabilities as the Earliest Flavor Conversion in Supernovae, Phys. Rev. Lett. 135 (2025) 23, 231003, arXiv:2507.22985 [hep-ph]

 

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