Equilibration Processes of Quantum Many-Neutrino Systems in Core-Collapse Supernovae

Accurately modeling dense neutrino systems is critical to the understanding of high density astrophysical environments, such as core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers. We investigate how the number of neutrino flavors, N, affects the equilibration and thermalization of quantum many-body neutrino systems. For our investigation, we utilize the full neutrino-neutrino Hamiltonian, as derived in [PRD 110, 123028], thereby including the usually neglected non-forward scattering terms. We then analyze several many-body neutrino systems with differing numbers of flavors, focusing on N = 1, 2, and 3, and we examine the thermalization process for both flavor and momentum degrees of freedom. Preliminary results suggest that a higher number of flavors will increase entanglement entropy and shorten the timescales required to achieve thermalization.