TAPIR Seminar

Neutrinos play a crucial role in hot, dense environments, such as the early Universe, core collapse supernovae and compact object mergers. Neutrinos can transport energy, entropy and lepton number over long distances and give rise to observable signals that can provide insights both into fundamental neutrino physics and into the nature of these environments.  The interplay of neutrino transport and flavor evolution can be important both to the dynamics of neutrino-affected environments and to the observable signals, but it is currently poorly understood.  I will describe the general formalism by which one can treat the transport of flavored particles and discuss the applications of this approach to compact object mergers, supernovae and the early Universe.