Neutrinos as astrophysical probes

Abstract

The aim of these notes is to provide a brief review of the topic of neutrino astronomy and in particular of neutrinos from core collapse supernovae. They are addressed to a curious reader, beginning to work in a multidisciplinary area that involves experimental neutrino physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics and particle physics phenomenology. After an introduction to the methods and goals of neutrinos astronomy, we focus on core collapse supernovae, as (one of) the most promising astrophysical source of neutrinos. The first part is organized almost as a tale, the last part is a bit more technical. We discuss the impact of flavor oscillations on the supernova neutrino signal (=the change of perspective due to recent achievements) and consider one specific example of signal in detail. This shows that effects of oscillations are important, but astrophysical uncertainties should be thought as an essential systematics for a correct interpretation of future experimental data. Three appendices corroborate the text with further details and some basics on flavor oscillations; but no attempt of a complete bibliographical survey is done (in practice, we selected a few references that we believe are useful for a `modern' introduction to the subject. We suggest the use of public databases for papers as SPIRES or NASA/ESO or for experiments as SPIRES or PaNAGIC to get a more complete information).

18 pages, 3 figures. To appear in "Surveys in High energy Physics"

References in corpus (11)

• The angular distribution of the reaction ${\bar{\nu }}_e+p\to e^{+}+n$
• Precise quasielastic neutrino/nucleon cross section
• High-energy Neutrino Astronomy: The Cosmic Ray Connection
• Core-Collapse Simulations of Rotating Stars
• Bayesian analysis of neutrinos observed from supernova SN 1987A
• Search for Supernova Relic Neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande
• Oscillation effects on supernova neutrino rates and spectra and detection of the shock breakout in a liquid Argon TPC
• Effects of Neutrino Oscillation on the Supernova Neutrino Spectrum
• Supernova neutrino oscillations: A simple analytical approach
• Neutrino Capture Cross Sections for Ar-40 and beta-decay of Ti-40
• Supernova 1987A did not test the neutrino mass hierarchy

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Collective neutrino flavor transitions in supernovae and the role of trajectory averaging
• Damping of supernova neutrino transitions in stochastic shock-wave density profiles
• Comparative analysis of SN1987A antineutrino fluence
• Supernova Relic Neutrinos in Liquid Argon detectors
• Excitation of nuclear giant resonances in neutrino scattering off nuclei
• Study of the effect of neutrino oscillations on the supernova neutrino signal in the LVD detector
• New Test of Supernova Electron Neutrino Emission using Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Sensitivity to the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background
• Delayed Detonation Thermonuclear Supernovae With An Extended Dark Matter Component
• Could an hypercritical accretion be associated with the atypical magnetic-field behavior in RX J0822-4300?