Many-body neutrino flavor entanglement in a simple dynamic model

Abstract

Dense neutrino gases form in extreme astrophysical sites, and the flavor content of the neutrinos likely has an important impact on the subsequent dynamical evolution of their environment. Through coherent forward scattering among neutrinos, the flavor content of the gas evolves under a time-dependent potential which can be modeled in a quantum many-body formalism as an all-to-all coupled spin-spin interaction. This two-body potential generically introduces entanglement and greatly complicates the study of these systems. In this work we study the evolution of the quantum many-body problem as well as the typically employed mean-field approximation to it for a small number of neutrinos ($N = 16$). We consider randomly chosen one- and two-body couplings in the Hamiltonian, and the resulting evolution of several initial product states. We subsequently compare many-body and mean-field predictions for one-body observables, and we consider one- and two-body entanglement to assess under what conditions the many-body and mean-field predictions are likely to disagree. Except for a special category of prototypical initial conditions, we find that the typically employed mean-field approximation is insufficient to capture the evolution of one-body operators in the systems we consider. We also observe a loss of coherence in one- and two-body trace-reduced subsystems which suggests that the evolution may be well approximated as a classical mixture of separable states.