Chiral magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in core-collapse supernovae

TL;DR

This paper develops and simulates chiral magnetohydrodynamics in core-collapse supernovae, revealing that chiral effects can reverse turbulent energy cascades, potentially influencing supernova explosion mechanisms.

Contribution

The study formulates chiral MHD equations for supernova conditions and demonstrates through simulations that chiral effects induce an inverse cascade in turbulence.

Findings

Inverse cascade of magnetic energy observed

Chiral effects can reverse turbulent cascade direction

Potential impact on supernova explosion dynamics

Abstract

Macroscopic evolution of relativistic charged matter with chirality imbalance is described by the chiral magnetohydrodynamics (chiral MHD). One such astrophysical system is high-density lepton matter in core-collapse supernovae where the chirality imbalance of leptons is generated by the parity-violating weak processes. After developing the chiral MHD equations for this system, we perform numerical simulations for the real-time evolutions of magnetic and flow fields, and study the properties of the chiral MHD turbulence. In particular, we observe the inverse cascade of the magnetic energy and the fluid kinetic energy. Our results suggest that the chiral effects that have been neglected so far can reverse the turbulent cascade direction from direct to inverse cascade, which would impact the magnetohydrodynamics evolution in the supernova core toward explosion.