What can be learned from a future supernova neutrino detection?

Abstract

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the only supernova from which we have detected neutrinos -SN 1987A. The twenty or so neutrinos that were detected were mined to great depth in order to determine the events that occurred in the explosion and to place limits upon all manner of neutrino properties. Since 1987 the scale and sensitivity of the detectors capable of identifying neutrinos from a Galactic supernova have grown considerably so that current generation detectors are capable of detecting of order ten thousand neutrinos for a supernova at the Galactic Center. Next generation detectors will increase that yield by another order of magnitude. Simultaneous with the growth of neutrino detection capability, our understanding of how massive stars explode and how the neutrino interacts with hot and dense matter has also increased by a tremendous degree. The neutrino signal will contain much information on all manner of physics of interest to a wide community. In this review we describe the expected features of the neutrino signal, the detectors which will detect it, and the signatures one might try to look for in order to get at this physics.

Neutrino flavour evolution through fluctuating matter

“…To illustrate this neutrino version of induced transparency, in figure (2) we plot the transition probability as a function of r when the system is at perfect resonance, namely when q 1 = k 3 − k 1 and q 2 = k 3 − k 2 . The reader will observe that indeed, even though the wavenumber q 1 is exactly on resonance with the transition between neutrino states 1 and 3, the probability of being in state 3 has a maximum of only 10% when A 2 = 0.…”

“…Perhaps one of the more unusual cases of a driven quantum mechanical system is the flavour evolution in space/time of a neutrino as it propagates through inhomogeneously distributed matter and/or through a field of other neutrinos. The phenomenology of neutrino flavour evolution in environments such as core-collapse supernovae, the merger of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole, has been found to be very rich: for recent reviews of supernova neutrinos see Mirizzi et al [1] and Horiuchi & Kneller [2]. An equivalence of a neutrino to other driven quantum systems can be made because the neutrino flavour evolution in these environments is calculated from a Schrödinger equation governed by a Hamiltonian.…”

Heavy sterile neutrino emission in core-collapse supernovae: constraints and signatures

“…For this unique property, a SN can be truly considered a neutrino factory to probe fundamental properties of neutrinos, e.g. mixing and nonstandard interactions (see, e.g., [1,2] for recent reviews). At this regard, the next detection of a SN neutrino burst from a Galactic event in a large underground detector is considered one of the next frontiers of low-energy neutrino astronomy.…”

Fast neutrino flavor conversion as oscillations in a quartic potential

“…This has been a topic of heightened interest for the past decade, as reviewed in refs. [28][29][30].…”