Leptonic and semi-leptonic neutrino interactions with muons in the proto-neutron star cooling

TL;DR

This paper evaluates neutrino-muon interaction rates during proto-neutron star cooling, especially at late times, revealing dominant processes and their implications for supernova neutrino signals.

Contribution

It provides detailed calculations of neutrino-muon interactions, including form factors and dispersion relation modifications, focusing on late-phase proto-neutron star cooling.

Findings

Flavor-exchange reactions can dominate neutrino opacities at low energies.

Inverse muon decay can overwhelm other neutrino interactions at low energies.

Energy and angular dependences of reactions are complex and significant for modeling.

Abstract

It is known that muons are scarce just after the birth of a proto-neutron star via a supernova explosion but get more abundant as the proto-neutron star cools via neutrino emissions on the Kelvin-Helmholtz timescale. In this paper we evaluate all the relevant rates of the neutrino interactions with muons at different times in the proto-neutron star cooling. We are particularly interested in the late phase ($ t \gtrsim 10 \operatorname{s}$), which will be accessible in the next Galactic supernova but has not been studied well so far. We calculate both leptonic and semi-leptonic processes, for the latter of which we pay attention also to the form factors with their dependence on the transferred momentum as well as to the modification of the dispersion relations for nucleons on the mean field level. We find that the flavor-exchange reactions $\nu_e + \mu^- \rightarrow \nu_{\mu} + e^-$ and $\bar{\nu}_{\mu} + \mu^- \rightarrow \bar{\nu}_e + e^-$ can be dominant, particularly at low energies, over the capture of $\nu_e$ on neutron and the scatterings of $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$ on nucleons as the opacity sources for these species and that the inverse muon decay $ \bar{\nu}_e + \nu_{\mu} + e^- \leftrightarrows \mu^- $ can overwhelm the scatterings of $\bar{\nu}_e$ and $\nu_{\mu}$ on nucleons again at low energies. At high energies, on the other hand, the corrections in the semi-leptonic processes mentioned above are more important. We also show the non-trivial energy- and angular dependences of the flavor-exchange reactions and the inverse muon decay. In the study of the diffusion coefficients from these reactions, we find that $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$ is most affected. These pieces of information are indispensable for numerical computations and the interpretation of results thereof for the proto-neutron star cooling particularly at the very late phase.