Physical, numerical, and computational challenges of modeling neutrino transport in core-collapse supernovae

Understand

The proposal that core collapse supernovae are neutrino driven is still the subject of active investigation more than fifty years after the seminal paper by Colgate and White.

• The modern version of this paradigm, which we owe to Wilson, proposes that the supernova shock wave is powered by neutrino heating, mediated by the absorption of electron-flavor neutrinos and antineutrinos emanating from the proto-neutron star surface, or neutrinosphere.
• Neutrino weak interactions with the stellar core fluid, the theory of which is still evolving, are flavor and energy dependent.
• The associated neutrino mean free paths extend over many orders of magnitude and are never always small relative to the stellar core radius.