Neutrino Pair Emission from Hot Nuclei During Stellar Collapse

TL;DR

This paper uses shell-model calculations to show that residual interactions significantly increase neutrino pair emission from hot nuclei during stellar collapse, potentially affecting supernova entropy transport.

Contribution

It provides a detailed shell-model analysis demonstrating enhanced neutrino pair emission rates and higher energy pairs compared to previous models.

Findings

Residual interactions boost neutrino pair emission rates.

Emitted neutrino pairs have higher energies than previously estimated.

The process remains dominant near neutrino trapping onset.

Abstract

We present shell-model calculations showing that residual interaction-induced configuration mixing enhances the rate of neutral current de-excitation of thermally excited nuclei into neutrino-antineutrino pairs. Though our calculations reinforce the conclusions of previous studies that this process is the dominant source of neutrino pairs near the onset of neutrino trapping during stellar collapse, our shell-model result has the effect of increasing the energy of these pairs, possibly altering their role in entropy transport in supernovae.