Derivation of the Isotropic Diffusion Source Approximation (IDSA) for Supernova Neutrino Transport by Asymptotic Expansions

Understand

We present Chapman--Enskog and Hilbert expansions applied to the $\BigO(v/c)$ Boltzmann equation for the radiative transfer of neutrinos in core-collapse supernovae.

• Based on the Legendre expansion of the scattering kernel for the collision integral truncated after the second term, we derive the diffusion limit for the Boltzmann equation by truncation of Chapman--Enskog or Hilbert expansions with reaction and collision scaling.
• We also give asymptotically sharp results obtained by the use of an additional time scaling.
• The diffusion limit determines the diffusion source in the \emph{Isotropic Diffusion Source Approximation (IDSA)} of Boltzmann's equation for which the free streaming limit and the reaction limit serve as limiters.