Charged-Current Muonic Reactions in Core-Collapse Supernovae

Abstract

The steady advance in core-collapse supernova simulations requires a more precise description of neutrino processes in hot and dense matter. In this work, we study the rates of charged-current (CC) weak processes with (anti)muons in supernova matter. At the relativistic mean field level, we derive results for the rates of CC neutrino-nucleon reactions, taking into account full kinematics, weak magnetism and pseudoscalar terms, and q 2 -dependent nucleon form factors in the hadronic current. In addition to muonic semileptonic processes we also consider purely leptonic processes. In particular, we show that inverse muon decay can dominate the opacities for low energy νµ and νe at densities 10 13 g cm −3 .

Impact of neutrino pair-production rates in Core-Collapse Supernovae

“…The dominate production processes for these pairs in CC-SNe include electron-positron annihilation and nucleonnucleon bremsstrahlung. Charged-current interactions (either emission or absorption) of single heavy-lepton neutrinos with muons or taus are suppressed due to those charged lepton's large mass, although see [33][34][35].…”