Simulations of Core Collapse Supernovae In One and Two Dimemsions Using Multigroup Neutrino Transport

The proposal that core collapse supernovae are neutrino driven is still the subject of active investigation more than fifty years after the seminal paper by Colgate and White. The modern version of this paradigm, which we owe to Wilson, proposes that the supernova shock wave is powered by neutrino heating, mediated by the absorption of electron-flavor neutrinos and antineutrinos emanating from the proto-neutron star surface, or neutrinosphere. Neutrino weak interactions with ...

The pursuit of the core collapse supernova explosion mechanism continues. While such efforts have been undertaken over the last four decades, it is only in the last decade that multidimensional models have been developed, and only in the last few years that significant components of supernova models, such as the neutrino transport, have been modeled with sufficient realism. We can now identify what are arguably the important components that must be included in any realistic t...

We review the status of the current quest to understand the mechanism of core-collapse supernovae, if neutrino-driven. In the process, we discuss the spherical explosion paradigm and its problems, some results from our new suite of collapse calculations performed using a recently-developed 1D implicit, multi-group, Feautrier/tangent-ray, Boltzmann solver coupled to explicit predictor/corrector hydrodynamics, the basic energetics of supernova explosions, and the promise of mul...

We have conducted a series of numerical experiments with the spherically symmetric, general relativistic, neutrino radiation hydrodynamics code Agile-BOLTZTRAN to examine the effects of several approximations used in multidimensional core-collapse supernova simulations. Our code permits us to examine the effects of these approximations quantitatively by removing, or substituting for, the pieces of supernova physics of interest. These approximations include: (1) using Newtonia...

In this work, we extended an energy-integrated neutrino transport method to facilitate efficient, yet precise, modeling of compact astrophysical objects. We focus particularly on core-collapse supernovae. We implemented the framework of Foucart et al. (2016) into FLASH and performed a detailed evaluation of its accuracy in core-collapse supernova simulations. Based on comparisons with results from simulations using energy-dependent neutrino transport, we incorporated several ...

Two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of stellar core-collapse with and without rotation are presented which for the first time were performed by solving the Boltzmann equation for the neutrino transport including a state-of-the-art description of neutrino interactions. Although convection develops below the neutrinosphere and in the neutrino-heated region behind the supernova shock, the models do not explode. This suggests missing physics, possibly with respect to the nuc...

We perform axisymmetric (2D) multi-angle, multi-group neutrino radiation-hydrodynamic calculations of the postbounce phase of core-collapse supernovae using a genuinely 2D discrete-ordinate (S_n) method. We follow the long-term postbounce evolution of the cores of one nonrotating and one rapidly-rotating 20-solar-mass stellar model for ~400 milliseconds from 160 ms to ~550 ms after bounce. We present a multi-D analysis of the multi-angle neutrino radiation fields and compare ...

We present the first complete 3-dimensional simulations of the core-collapse of a massive star from the onset of collapse to the resultant supernova explosion. We compare the structure of the convective instabilities that occur in 3-dimensional models with those of past 2-dimensional simulations. Although the convective instabilities are clearly 3-dimensional in nature, we find that both the size-scale of the flows and the net enhancement to neutrino heating does not differ g...

To investigate the physical nature of neutrino-heating on the result of a 1-dimensional core-collapse supernova. Colgate were the first to suggest that neutrinos may play a crucial role in core collapse supernova by taking up gravitational binding energy from the core and depositing it in the rest of the star. The fluid is contained in a shock tube in a region extending from the neutrino-sphere of a star out 1000 km, and irradiated with a neutrino flux emanating from the surf...

The explosion mechanism of core-collapse supernovae is a long-standing problem in stellar astrophysics. We briefly outline the main contenders for a solution and review recent efforts to model core-collapse supernova explosions by means of multi-dimensional simulations. We discuss several suggestions for solving the problem of missing or delayed neutrino-driven explosions in three-dimensional supernova models, including -- among others -- variations in the microphysics and la...