Towards Multi Energy Neutrino Astronomy: Diagnosing Enhanced Circumstellar Material around Stripped-Envelope Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method to detect enhanced circumstellar material around supernovae using neutrinos across multiple energy regimes, enabling early diagnosis of pre-supernova activity and advancing multi-energy neutrino astronomy.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach combining thermal and non-thermal neutrino signals to diagnose circumstellar material, demonstrating feasibility with current and future neutrino detectors.

Findings

Method is applicable up to ~1 kpc distance.

Estimated neutrino event rates for JUNO and IceCube.

Potential for multi-energy neutrino astronomy with next-generation detectors.

Abstract

A novel approach is proposed to reveal a secret birth of enhanced circumstellar material (CSM) surrounding a collapsing massive star using neutrinos as a unique probe. In this scheme, non-thermal TeV-scale neutrinos produced in ejecta-CSM interactions are tied with thermal MeV neutrinos emitted from a pre-explosion burning process, based on a scenario that CSM had been formed via the pre-supernova activity. Taking a representative model of the pre-supernova neutrinos, the spectrum and light curve of the corresponding high-energy CSM neutrinos are calculated at multiple mass-loss efficiencies, which are considered as a systematic uncertainty. In addition, as a part of the method demonstration, the detected event rates along time at JUNO and IceCube, as representative detectors, are estimated for the pre-supernova and CSM neutrinos, respectively, and are compared with the expected background rate at each detector. The presented method is found to be reasonably applicable for the range up to $\sim$1 kpc and even farther with future experimental efforts. The potentialities of other neutrino detectors, such as SK-Gd, Hyper-Kamiokande and KM3NeT, are also discussed. This is a pioneering work of performing astrophysics with neutrinos from diverse energy regimes, initiating multi energy neutrino astronomy in the forthcoming era where next-generation large-scale neutrino telescopes are operating.