EstrellaNueva: an open-source software to study the interactions and detection of neutrinos emitted by supernovae

TL;DR

EstrellaNueva is an open-source tool that calculates supernova neutrino interaction rates in detectors, considering flavor transformations and various interaction channels, facilitating comparison between supernova models and observations.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, standalone software that models supernova neutrino interactions with customizable target materials and includes analytical cross sections, bridging supernova simulations and detector event predictions.

Findings

Calculates expected neutrino event rates for various detector materials.

Includes flavor transformation effects in neutrino interactions.

Provides a user-friendly tool for physics scenario exploration.

Abstract

Supernovae emit large fluxes of neutrinos which can be detected by detectors on Earth. Future tonne-scale detectors will be sensitive to several neutrino interaction channels, with thousands of events expected if a supernova emerges in the galaxy neighborhood. There is a limited number of tools to study the interaction rates of supernova neutrinos, although a plethora of available supernova models exists. EstrellaNueva is an open-source software to calculate expected rates of supernova neutrinos in detectors using target materials with typical compositions, and additional compositions can be easily added. This software considers the flavor transformation of neutrinos in the supernova through the adiabatic Mikheyev--Smirnov--Wolfenstein effect, and their interaction in detectors through several channels. Most of the interaction cross sections have been analytically implemented, such as neutrino-electron and neutrino-proton elastic scattering, inverse beta decay, and coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. This software provides a link between supernova simulations and the expected events in detectors by calculating fluences and event rates to ease any comparison between theory and observation. It provides a simple and standalone tool to explore many physics scenarios offering an option to add analytical cross sections and define any target material.