Incorporating the Heisenberg and Pauli principles into the kinetic approach to neutrino oscillations

Abstract

Neutrinos play an important role in the supernovae explosions. The energy transfer from the core to the outer layers depends on the neutrino flavor evolution, affected by collective neutrino oscillations. The latter are damped by kinematic decoherence, developing in the course of the neutrino propagation. The kinematic decoherence caused by dephasing of many neutrinos is readily accounted for in the kinetic approach to neutrino oscillations. We show that the kinematic decoherence caused by dephasing of momentum modes of the neutrino wave-packets can also be accounted for in the kinetic approach through a choice of the initial conditions consistent with the uncertainty principle. According to the existing estimates, this effect may have a substantial impact on the phenomenology of supernovae neutrinos.