Sterile Neutrino-Enhanced Supernova Explosions

Abstract

We investigate the enhancement of lepton number, energy, and entropy transport resulting from active-sterile neutrino conversion ${\nu }_e\to {\nu }_s$ deep in the post-bounce supernova core followed by re-conversion ${\nu }_s\to {\nu }_e$ further out, near the neutrino sphere. We explicitly take account of shock wave and neutrino heating modification of the active neutrino forward scattering potential which governs sterile neutrino production. We find that the ${\nu }_e$ luminosity at the neutrino sphere could be increased by between $\sim 10$ and $\sim 100$ during the crucial shock re-heating epoch if the sterile neutrino has a rest mass and vacuum mixing parameters in ranges which include those required for viable sterile neutrino dark matter. We also find sterile neutrino transport-enhanced entropy deposition ahead of the shock. This `` pre-heating\rq\rq can help melt heavy nuclei and thereby reduce the nuclear photo-dissociation burden on the shock. Both neutrino luminosity enhancement and pre-heating could increase the likelihood of a successful core collapse supernova explosion.

12 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Analysis of Collective Neutrino Flavor Transformation in Supernovae

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Dark-matter sterile neutrinos in models with a gauge singlet in the Higgs sector
• Constraints on decaying Dark Matter from XMM-Newton observations of M31
• Strong Upper Limits on Sterile Neutrino Warm Dark Matter
• Delayed pulsar kicks from the emission of sterile neutrinos
• Signatures of heavy sterile neutrinos at long baseline experiments