Gr.IV seminar: Damiano Fiorillo - "Neutrino plasma: a new state of matter"

Wednesday 1 Apr 2026, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

0M04

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.
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. 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.