Boltzmann equations for neutrinos with flavor mixings

Abstract

With a view of applications to the simulations of supernova explosions and protoneutron star cooling, we derive the Boltzmann equations for the neutrino transport with flavor mixing based on the real time formalism of the nonequilibrium field theory and the gradient expansion of the Green function. The relativistic kinematics is properly taken into account. The advection terms are derived in the mean field approximation for the neutrino self-energy while the collision terms are obtained in the Born approximation. The resulting equations take the familiar form of the Boltzmann equation with corrections due to mixing both in the advection part and in the collision part. These corrections are essentially the same as those derived by Sirera et al. for the advection terms and those by Raffelt et al. for the collision terms, respectively, though the formalism employed here is different from theirs. The derived equations will be easily implemented in numerical codes employed in the simulations of supernova explosions and protoneutron star cooling.