Neutrino Oscillations and Decoherence in Short-GRB Progenitors

Abstract

Neutrinos are produced in cosmic accelerators, like active galactic nuclei, blazars, supernova remnants and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). On their way to the Earth they experience flavor oscillations. The interactions of the neutrinos coming from the source with other particles, e.g., intergalactic primordial neutrinos or heavy-mass right-handed neutrinos, on their way to the detector may transform the original wavepacket in pointer states. This phenomenon, known as decoherence, becomes important in the reconstruction of processes at the source. In this work, we study neutrino emission in short GRBs by adopting the Fireshell Model. We consider e - e + -pair annihilation as the main channel for neutrino production. We compare the properties of the neutrino flux with the characteristic photon signal produced once the transparency condition is reached. We study the effects of flavor oscillations and decoherence as neutrinos travel from the region near the black hole event horizon outward. We consider the source to be in thermal equilibrium and calculate energy distribution functions for electrons and neutrinos. To compute the effects of decoherence we use a Gaussian model. In this scenario, the emitted electron-neutrinos transform into pointer states consisting of 67.8% electron-neutrinos and 32.2% as a combination of mu and tau neutrinos. We found that decoherence plays an important role in the evolution of the neutrino wavepacket, leading to the detected pointer states on Earth.