On the Neutrino Self Refraction Problem from a Many-Body Perspective.

We consider a dense neutrino gas as a many body system by taking into account both vacuum oscillations and self interactions of neutrinos. We show that the exact many body Hamiltonian which describes the flavor oscillations of such a dense neutrino gas has many constants of motion whose eigenvalues represent a set of good quantum numbers. However, if one adopts the random phase approximation as an effective one particle description, these operators are no longer conserved (i.e. they cease to represent good quantum numbers) although their expectation values are still conserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]