Supernova Neutrinos and the Neutrino Masses

While an understanding of supernova explosions will require sophisticated large-scale simulations, it is nevertheless possible to outline the most basic features of the neutrino emission resulting from stellar core collapse with a pedestrian account that, through reliance upon broadly accessible physical ideas, remains simple and largely self-contained.

In this brief review we explore the role of neutrino-nucleus interactions in core-collapse supernovae and discuss open questions. In addition implications of neutrino mass and mixings in such environments are summarized.

The neutrino-nucleon cross section is slightly larger than that for $\bar\nu-N$. Therefore, $\bar\nu$ will escape more quickly from core collapse supernovae leaving the star $\nu$ rich. A diffusion formalism is used to calculate the time evolution of the mu and tau lepton number densities. These quickly reach steady state equilibria. We estimate that a protoneutron star with a maximum temperature near 50 MeV will contain over 50 % more $\nu_\mu$ and $\nu_\tau$ than $\bar\nu_\...

Transporting nu_mu and nu_tau in a supernova (SN) core involves several processes that have been neglected in traditional simulations. Based on a Monte Carlo study we find that the flavor-dependent spectral differences are much smaller than is often stated in the literature. A full-scale SN simulation using a Boltzmann solver and including all relevant neutrino reactions confirms these results. The flavor-dependent flux differences are largest during the initial accretion pha...

The gravitational core collapse of a star produces a huge burst of neutrinos of all flavors. A number of detectors worldwide are sensitive to such a burst; its detection would yield information about both particle physics and astrophysics. Sensitivity to all flavors, and ability to tag different interactions, will be key for extraction of information. Here I will survey the capabilities of current and future detectors for detection of supernova neutrinos from the Milky Way an...

New methods are proposed with the goal to determine absolute neutrino masses from the simultaneous observation of the bursts of neutrinos and gravitational waves emitted during a stellar collapse. It is shown that the neutronization electron neutrino flash and the maximum amplitude of the gravitational wave signal are tightly synchronized with the bounce occuring at the end of the core collapse on a timescale better than 1 ms. The existing underground neutrino detectors (Supe...

We discuss the prospects for improved upper limits on neutrino masses that may be provided by a core-collapse supernova explosion in our galaxy, if it exhibits time variations in the neutrino emissions on the scale of a few milliseconds as suggested by recent two-dimensional simulations. Analyzing simulations of such neutrino emissions using the wavelet technique adopted in [1], we find that an upper limit m_nu ~ 0.14 eV could be established at the 95% confidence level if the...

We study the flavor-dependent neutrino spectra formation in the core of a supernova (SN) by means of Monte Carlo simulations. A high-statistics neutrino signal from a galactic SN may contain information that severely constrains the parameter space for neutrino oscillations. Therefore, reliable predictions for flavor-dependent fluxes and spectra are urgently needed. In all traditional hydrodynamic simulations the nu_mu,tau and nu_mu,tau-bar interactions commonly included are r...

Core-collapse supernovae are powerful neutrino sources. The observation of a future (extra-)galactic supernova explosion or of the relic supernova neutrinos might provide important information on the supernova dynamics, on the supernova formation rate and on neutrino properties. One might learn more about unknown neutrino properties either from indirect effects in the supernova (e.g. on the explosion or on in the r-process) or from modifications of the neutrino time or energy...

One of the few remaining unknowns in the standard three-flavor neutrino oscillation paradigm is the ordering of neutrino masses. In this work we propose a novel method for determining neutrino mass ordering using the time information on early supernova neutrino events. In a core-collapse supernova, neutrinos are produced earlier than antineutrinos and, depending on the mass ordering which affects the adiabatic flavor evolution, may cause earlier observable signals in $\nu_e$ ...