Effects of neutrino oscillations on nucleosynthesis and neutrino signals for an 18 M supernova model

TL;DR

This study investigates how neutrino flavor oscillations influence supernova nucleosynthesis and neutrino detection, revealing their impact on isotope production and potential to determine neutrino mass hierarchy.

Contribution

It provides detailed analysis of collective neutrino oscillations' effects on nucleosynthesis and neutrino signals using a realistic supernova model, highlighting the sensitivity to spectral and density evolution.

Findings

Oscillations enhance production of 138La and 180Ta

Little impact on nu p-process nucleosynthesis

Potential to infer neutrino mass hierarchy from detector signals

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the effects of neutrino flavor oscillations on supernova nucleosynthesis and on the neutrino signals. Our study is based on detailed information about the neutrino spectra and their time evolution from a spherically-symmetric supernova model for an 18 M progenitor. We find that collective neutrino oscillations are not only sensitive to the detailed neutrino energy and angular distributions at emission, but also to the time evolution of both the neutrino spectra and the electron density profile. We apply the results of neutrino oscillations to study the impact on supernova nucleosynthesis and on the neutrino signals from a Galactic supernova. We show that in our supernova model, collective neutrino oscillations enhance the production of rare isotopes 138La and 180Ta but have little impact on the nu p-process nucleosynthesis. In addition, the adiabatic MSW flavor transformation, which occurs in the C/O and He shells of the supernova, may affect the production of light nuclei such as 7Li and 11B. For the neutrino signals, we calculate the rate of neutrino events in the Super-Kamiokande detector and in a hypothetical liquid argon detector. Our results suggest the possibility of using the time profiles of the events in both detectors, along with the spectral information of the detected neutrinos, to infer the neutrino mass hierarchy.