Neutrino-nucleus reactions and their role for supernova dynamics and nucleosynthesis

Understand

The description of nuclear reactions induced by supernova neutrinos has witnessed significant progress during the recent years.

• At the energies and momentum transfers relevant for supernova neutrinos neutrino-nucleus cross sections are dominated by allowed transitions, however, often with non-negligible contributions from (first) forbidden transitions.
• For several nuclei allowed Gamow-Teller strength distributions could be derived from charge-exchange reactions and from inelastic electron scattering data.
• Importantly the diagonalization shell model has been proven to accurately describe these data and hence became the appropriate tool to calculate the allowed contributions to neutrino-nucleus cross sections for supernova neutrinos.