Probing the Structure of Jet Driven Core-Collapse Supernova and Long Gamma Ray Burst Progenitors with High Energy Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper shows how high energy neutrino timing and energy patterns can reveal detailed information about the structure of supernova and gamma-ray burst progenitors, enabling differentiation with minimal observations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to use neutrino energy and timing data to probe progenitor structures and distinguish between different stellar origins in core-collapse events.

Findings

Neutrino onset time depends on progenitor structure.

Observable neutrino energy cutoffs relate to jet stalling radius.

Progenitor types can be identified with as few as one or two neutrino detections.

Abstract

Times of arrival of high energy neutrinos encode information about their sources. We demonstrate that the energy-dependence of the onset time of neutrino emission in advancing relativistic jets can be used to extract important information about the supernova/gamma-ray burst progenitor structure. We examine this energy and time dependence for different supernova and gamma-ray burst progenitors, including red and blue supergiants, helium cores, Wolf-Rayet stars, and chemically homogeneous stars, with a variety of masses and metallicities. For choked jets, we calculate the cutoff of observable neutrino energies depending on the radius at which the jet is stalled. Further, we exhibit how such energy and time dependence may be used to identify and differentiate between progenitors, with as few as one or two observed events, under favorable conditions.