Core-collapse supernovae in the hall of mirrors. A three-dimensional code-comparison project

TL;DR

This study compares four 3D hydrodynamics codes with different physics approximations for modeling core-collapse supernovae, assessing their agreement and the impact of various physical treatments on simulation outcomes.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive comparison of Eulerian and Lagrangian codes for CCSNe, evaluating effects of neutrino physics, gravity treatments, and rotation in 3D simulations.

Findings

Codes agree within 10-20% during collapse and early post-bounce.

Neutrino-electron scattering influences collapse dynamics.

Rotation enhances shock expansion and affects angular momentum loss.

Abstract

Modeling core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) with neutrino transport in three dimensions (3D) requires tremendous computing resources and some level of approximation. We present a first comparison study of CCSNe in 3D with different physics approximations and hydrodynamics codes. We aim to assess the impact of the hydrodynamics code, approximations for the neutrino and gravity treatments, and rotation on the simulation of CCSNe in 3D. We use four different hydrodynamics codes in this work (ELEPHANT, FLASH, fGR1, and SPHYNX) in combination with two different neutrino treatments, the isotropic diffusion source approximation (IDSA) and two-moment M1, and three different gravity treatments: Newtonian, 1D General Relativity (GR) correction, and full GR). Additional parameters discussed in this study are the inclusion of neutrino-electron scattering via a parametrized deleptonization (PD) and the influence of rotation. The four codes compared in this work include Eulerian and fully Lagrangian (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) codes for the first time. They show agreement in the overall evolution of the collapse phase and early post-bounce within the range of 10% (20% in some cases). The comparison of the different neutrino treatments highlights the need to further investigate the antineutrino luminosities in IDSA, which tend to be relatively high. We also demonstrate the requirement for a more detailed heavy-lepton neutrino leakage. When comparing with a full GR code, including an M1 transport method, we confirm the influence of neutrino-electron scattering during the collapse phase, which is adequately captured by the PD scheme. Also, the effective GR potential reproduces the overall dynamic evolution correctly in all Newtonian codes. Additionally, we verify that rotation aids the shock expansion and estimate the overall angular momentum losses for each code in rotating scenarios.