Charged-Current Muonic Reactions in Core-Collapse Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed calculation of charged-current muonic neutrino reactions in supernova matter, highlighting the importance of inverse muon decay at high densities for supernova simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive relativistic mean field approach to compute charged-current neutrino-nucleon reaction rates including full kinematics and form factors, considering muonic processes in supernovae.

Findings

Inverse muon decay can dominate neutrino opacities at high densities.

Charged-current reactions with muons are significant in supernova matter.

The study enhances the accuracy of neutrino interaction modeling in supernova simulations.

Abstract

The steady advance in core-collapse supernova simulations requires a more precise description of neutrino processes in hot and dense matter. In this work, we study the rates of charged-current (CC) weak processes with (anti)muons in supernova matter. At the relativistic mean field level, we derive results for the rates of CC neutrino-nucleon reactions, taking into account full kinematics, weak magnetism and pseudoscalar terms, and $q^2$-dependent nucleon form factors in the hadronic current. In addition to muonic semileptonic processes we also consider purely leptonic processes. In particular, we show that inverse muon decay can dominate the opacities for low energy $\nu_\mu$ and $\bar\nu_e$ at densities $\gtrsim 10^{13}~\rm{g~ cm^{-3}}$.