Code comparison for fast flavor instability simulations

Richers, Sherwood and Duan, Huaiyu and Wu, Meng-Ru and Bhattacharyya, Soumya and Zaizen, Masamichi and George, Manu and Lin, Chun-Yu and Xiong, Zewei 2022 Physical Review D 106 043011(10)

The fast flavor instability (FFI) is expected to be ubiquitous in core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers. It rapidly shuffles neutrino flavor in a way that could impact the explosion mechanism, neutrino signals, mass outflows, and nucleosynthesis. The variety of initial conditions and simulation methods employed in simulations of the FFI prevent an apples-to-apples comparison of the results. We simulate a standardized test problem using five independent codes and verify that they are all faithfully simulating the underlying quantum kinetic equations under the assumptions of axial symmetry and homogeneity in two directions. We quantify the amount of numerical error in each method and demonstrate that each method is superior in at least one metric of this error. We make the results publicly available to serve as a benchmark.