Chiral transport of neutrinos in supernovae: Neutrino-induced fluid helicity and helical plasma instability

Abstract

Chirality of neutrinos modifies the conventional kinetic theory and hydrodynamics, leading to unusual chiral transport related to quantum anomalies in field theory. We argue that these corrections have new phenomenological consequences for hot and dense neutrino gases, especially in core-collapse supernovae. We find that the neutrino density can be converted to the fluid helicity through the chiral vortical effect. This fluid helicity effectively acts as a chiral chemical potential for electrons via the momentum exchange with neutrinos and induces a "helical plasma instability" that generates a strong helical magnetic field. This provides a new mechanism for converting the gravitational energy released by the core collapse to the electromagnetic energy and potentially explains the origin of magnetars. The other possible applications of the neutrino chiral transport theory are also discussed.

Interacting fermions in rotation: chiral symmetry restoration, moment of inertia and thermodynamics

“…The vierbein e μ i is written in the Cartesian gauge [16], which connects the general coordinate with the Cartesian coordinate in the local rest frame, x µ = e μ i xî, is given by 11) and the other components being zero. This leads to the metric ηîĵ = g µν e μ i e ν j .…”

“…At the particle physics side the interest is heated by the fact that the noncentral heavy-ion collisions produce rapidly rotating quark-gluon plasma which should carry large global angular momentum [1][2][3][4]. The rotating relativistic systems experience anomalous transport phenomena such as, for example, the chiral vortical effect [6] which also has been discussed in an astrophysical context [7][8][9][10][11][12]. In the condensed matter the relativistic fermions appear in Weyl/Dirac semimetals that may also be sensitive to rotation due to the anomalous transport [13][14][15].…”

Nonlinear chiral transport phenomena

“…Examples of chiral matter are the electroweak plasma in the early Universe [1], quark-gluon plasmas created in heavy ion collisions [2,3], electromagnetic plasmas in neutron stars [4,5], neutrino matter in supernovae [6], and a new type of materials called the Weyl semimetals [7][8][9]. In this paper, we explicitly compute the transport coefficients of these nonlinear anomalous transports in chiral matter at low temperature, based on the kinetic theory with Berry curvature corrections [10][11][12][13][14][15] under the relaxation time approximation.…”

Chiral anomalous dispersion

“…This process transfers microscopic chirality of fermions to macroscopic helicity of magnetic fields and originates from the mixing of these two quantities. Such transfer is a general ingredient among all chiral instabilities [8,[12][13][14].…”