Ray-Tracing Analysis of Anisotropic Neutrino Radiation for Estimating Gravitational Waves in Core-Collapse Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper introduces a ray-tracing method to accurately estimate gravitational waves from anisotropic neutrino emissions in supernovae, revealing complex waveform features and smaller amplitudes than previous models, impacting detection prospects.

Contribution

The paper develops an analytic, three-dimensional applicable ray-tracing approach to compute neutrino anisotropies and resulting gravitational waveforms in supernova simulations.

Findings

Waveforms show more variety than previous estimates.

Negative growth features in waveforms due to lateral neutrino emission.

Wave amplitudes are over an order of magnitude smaller than earlier predictions.

Abstract

We propose a ray-tracing method to estimate gravitational waves (GWs) generated by anisotropic neutrino emission in supernova cores. To calculate the gravitational waveforms, we derive analytic formulae in a useful form, which are applicable also for three-dimensional computations. Pushed by evidence of slow rotation prior to core-collapse, we focus on asphericities in neutrino emission and matter motions outside the protoneutron star. Based on the two-dimensional (2D) models, which mimic SASI-aided neutrino heating explosions, we compute the neutrino anisotropies via the ray-tracing method in a post-processing manner and calculate the resulting waveforms. With these computations, it is found that the waveforms exhibit more variety in contrast to the ones previously estimated by the ray-by-ray analysis (e.g., Kotake et al. (2007)). In addition to a positively growing feature, which was predicted to determine the total wave amplitudes predominantly, the waveforms are shown to exhibit large negative growth for some epochs during the growth of SASI. These features are found to stem from the excess of neutrino emission in lateral directions, which can be precisely captured by the ray-tracing calculation. Due to the negative contributions and the neutrino absorptions appropriately taken into account by the ray-tracing method, the wave amplitudes become more than one-order-of magnitude smaller than the previous estimation, thus making their detections very hard for a galactic source.On the other hand, it is pointed out that the GW spectrum from matter motions have its peak near $\sim 100$ Hz, which could be characteristic for the SASI-induced supernova explosions.(abridged)