Recoil-Enabled Energy Transfer from Coherent Neutrino Scattering in Core-Collapse Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that including nuclear recoil in neutrino scattering models significantly impacts energy transfer in supernovae, potentially aiding shock revival without altering neutrino spectra.

Contribution

It introduces nuclear recoil into neutrino-matter interaction models, showing its importance in supernova shock revival simulations.

Findings

Recoil enhances local energy transfer by a few keV per neutrino.

Total heating from recoil is comparable to the energy needed for shock revival.

Neutrino spectra and lepton-number balance remain unaffected by recoil.

Abstract

We revisit neutrino-matter coupling in the post-shock region of core-collapse supernovae by restoring nuclear recoil in coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS). The resulting local energy transfer (a few keV per ~10 MeV neutrino) accumulates across the ~100 km stalled-shock layer, yielding a total heating of 10^49-10^50 erg, comparable within an order of magnitude to the increment required to trigger shock revival in current multidimensional simulations. This indicates that the long-standing failure of isoenergetic transport schemes to revive the shock originates from their neglect of recoil kinematics. Because the momentum exchange in each scattering is tiny, the emergent neutrino spectra and lepton-number balance remain essentially unchanged. The result highlights nuclear recoil as a minimal yet physically grounded correction to standard neutrino transport, providing a self-consistent route toward reliable explosion modeling.