Narrow Results

It has been hypothesized recently that core collapse supernovae are triggered by mildly relativistic jets following observations of radio properties of these explosions. Association of a jet, similar to a gamma-ray burst jet but only slower, allows shock acceleration of particles to high energy and non-thermal neutrino emission from a supernova. Detection of these high energy neutrinos in upcoming kilometer scale Cherenkov detectors may be the only direct way to probe inside these astrophysical phenomena as electromagnetic radiation is thermal and contains little information. Calculation of high energy neutrino signal from a simple and slow jet model buried inside the pre-supernova star is reviewed here. The detection prospect of these neutrinos in water or ice detector is also discussed in this brief review. Jetted core collapse supernovae in nearby galaxies may provide the strongest high energy neutrino signal from point sources.

In a recent study by Cole et al. [A. L. Cole et al., Phys. Rev. C86 (2012) 015809], it was concluded that quasi-particle random phase approximation (QRPA) calculations show larger deviations and overestimate the total experimental Gamow–Teller (GT) strength. It was also concluded that QRPA calculated electron capture rates exhibit larger deviation than those derived from the measured GT strength distributions. The main purpose of this study is to probe the findings of the Cole et al. paper. This study gives useful information on the performance of QRPA-based nuclear models. As per simulation results, the capturing of electrons that occur on medium heavy isotopes have a significant role in decreasing the ratio of electron-to-baryon content of the stellar interior during the late stages of core evolution. We report the calculation of allowed charge-changing transitions strength for odd-$A$$fp$-shell nuclei (${}^{45}$Sc and ${}^{55}$Mn) by employing the deformed pn-QRPA approach. The computed GT transition strength is compared with previous theoretical calculations and measured data. For stellar applications, the corresponding electron capture rates are computed and compared with rates using previously calculated and measured GT values. Our finding shows that our calculated results are in decent accordance with measured data. At higher stellar temperature, our calculated electron capture rates are larger than those calculated by independent particle model (IPM) and shell model. It was further concluded that at low temperature and high density regions, the positron emission weak-rates from ${}^{45}$Sc and ${}^{55}$Mn may be neglected in simulation codes.

Core-collapse supernovae produce copious low-energy neutrinos and are also predicted to radiate gravitational waves. These two messengers can give us information regarding the explosion mechanism. The gravitational wave detection from these events are still elusive even with the already advanced detectors. Here we give a concise and timely introduction to a new method that combines triggers from GW and neutrino observatories; more details shall be given in a forthcoming paper.