Julien Froustey

Collisional flavor instabilities, driven by differing neutrino and antineutrino reaction rates, are expected to occur in dense astrophysical environments like supernovae and neutron star mergers, but have yet to be incorporated in large-scale simulations. We derive, for the first time, analytical expressions for the asymptotic state resulting from a homogeneous and isotropic instability, and apply these predictions to two representative conditions from a neutron star merger simulation. We emphasize the importance of using a collision term that allows for both damping of flavor coherence and relaxation back to thermal equilibrium, which leads to a "quantum" equilibrium with nonzero coherence. These results can be implemented in a subgrid model of collisional flavor transformation, an important step toward the inclusion of flavor oscillation physics into global simulations.