New Aspects and Boundary Conditions of Core-Collapse Supernova Theory

Abstract

Core-collapse supernovae are among Nature's grandest explosions. They are powered by the energy released in gravitational collapse and include a rich set of physical phenomena involving all fundamental forces and many branches of physics and astrophysics. We summarize the current state of core-collapse supernova theory and discuss the current set of candidate explosion mechanisms under scrutiny as core-collapse supernova modeling is moving towards self-consistent three-dimensional simulations. Recent work in nuclear theory and neutron star mass and radius measurements are providing new constraints for the nuclear equation of state. We discuss these new developments and their impact on core-collapse supernova modeling. Neutrino-neutrino forward scattering in the central regions of core-collapse supernovae can lead to collective neutrino flavor oscillations that result in swaps of electron and heavy-lepton neutrino spectra. We review the rapid progress that is being made in understanding these collective oscillations and their potential impact on the core-collapse supernova explosion mechanism.

14 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to the proceedings of the HAmburg Neutrinos from Supernova Explosions (HANSE) 2011 conference

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• Is Strong SASI Activity the Key to Successful Neutrino-Driven Supernova Explosions?
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• Suppression of Self-Induced Flavor Conversion in the Supernova Accretion Phase
• Instability in the dense supernova neutrino gas with flavor-dependent angular distributions

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The Progenitor Dependence of the Preexplosion Neutrino Emission in Core-Collapse Supernovae
• Fully General Relativistic Simulations of Core-Collapse Supernovae with An Approximate Neutrino Transport
• A new candidate for probing Population III nucleosynthesis with carbon-enhanced damped Lyman-alpha systems
• The explosion energy of early stellar populations: The Fe-peak element ratios in low metallicity damped Lyman-alpha systems