Probing Circumstellar Material and Shock Acceleration in Core-Collapse Supernovae with High-Energy Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper investigates high-energy neutrino production from supernovae interacting with circumstellar material, assessing detection prospects and how neutrino observations can inform us about supernova environments and shock acceleration.

Contribution

It provides a detailed calculation of neutrino fluxes from supernovae with various CSM profiles and evaluates their detectability with IceCube, highlighting the potential to constrain supernova parameters.

Findings

Nearby supernovae with dense CSM can produce detectable neutrino signals.

Neutrino data can constrain CSM density and shock acceleration efficiency within a factor of 10.

Detection horizon for such neutrinos is approximately 0.1 to 1 Mpc.

Abstract

We study high-energy (HE) neutrino production from interactions between supernova (SN) ejecta and the surrounding circumstellar material (CSM), focusing on regular Type~II and Type~IIn SNe. Using observationally inferred CSM density distributions, we calculate the resulting neutrino fluxes and examine their dependence on key parameters, including the CSM density normalization $D_*$, outer radius $R_{\rm csm}$, proton acceleration efficiency $\epsilon_p$, and magnetic energy fraction $\epsilon_B$. Detection prospects are assessed with a binned likelihood analysis for IceCube, indicating that nearby SNe with moderately dense, confined CSM can produce detectable signals, with a typical detection horizon of $\sim 0.1$ - 1 Mpc. For a Galactic SN at $\sim 10$ kpc, high-statistics neutrino data with detailed temporal and spectral information can constrain $D_*$, $R_{\rm csm}$, and $\epsilon_p$ to within a factor of $\sim 10$ or to a precision of $\sim 20\%$, depending on the assumed values of $D_*$ and $R_{\rm csm}$. These neutrino signals thus provide a complementary probe of the CSM profile and shock acceleration, alongside traditional electromagnetic observations.