Improved neutrino-nucleon interactions in dense and hot matter for numerical simulations

Understand

Neutrinos play an important role in compact star astrophysics: neutrino-heating is one of the main ingredients in core-collapse supernovae, neutrino-matter interactions determine the composition of matter in binary neutron star mergers and have among others a strong impact on conditions for heavy element nucleosynthesis and neutron star cooling is dominated by neutrino emission except for very old stars.

• Many works in the last decades have shown that in dense matter medium effects considerably change the neutrino-matter interaction rates, whereas many astrophysical simulations use analytic approximations which are often far from reproducing more complete calculations.
• In this work we present a scheme which allows to incorporate improved rates, for charged current interactions, into simulations and show as an example some results for core-collapse supernovae, where a noticeable difference is found in the location of the neutrinospheres of the low-energy neutrinos in the early post-bounce phase.