Learning more about what can be concluded from the observation of neutrinos from a galactic supernova

Abstract

We investigate what one can hope to learn about the parameters that describe the neutrino fluxes emitted by the explosion of a galactic supernova using the observations of a megaton-size Water-Cherenkov detector. We calculate the allowed regions that can be obtained by fitting these parameters to a simulated observation of events by such a detector. All four available detection channels (inverse beta decay, charge and neutral current on oxygen and elastic scattering on electrons) are included in the fit and we use a ten dimensional parameters space. Nine parameters describe the initial neutrino fluxes and are referred to as the supernova parameters. Furthermore, we include the dependence on the Chooz mixing angle ${\theta }_{13}$, which controls the matter effects that the neutrino undergoes in the outer-parts of the supernova. If we do not make any extra assumption on these parameters, we show that one can hope to determine ${\theta }_{13}$ quite well whereas, except for the parameters describing the ${\bar{\nu }}_e$ flux, most of the supernova parameters are rather difficult to constrain, even if the four detection channels could be completely separated.

arXiv comment17 pages. References added and updated, additions in acknowledgment

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• What can be learned from a future supernova neutrino detection?