Rocks, Water and Noble Liquids: Unfolding the Flavor Contents of Supernova Neutrinos

Understand

Measuring core-collapse supernova neutrinos, both from individual supernovae within the Milky Way and from past core collapses throughout the Universe (the diffuse supernova neutrino background, or DSNB), is one of the main goals of current and next generation neutrino experiments.

• Detecting the heavy-lepton flavor (muon and tau types, collectively $\nu_x$) component of the flux is particularly challenging due to small statistics and large backgrounds.
• While the next galactic neutrino burst will be observed in a plethora of neutrino channels, allowing to measure a small number of $\nu_x$ events, only upper limits are anticipated for the diffuse $\nu_x$ flux even after decades of data taking with conventional detectors.
• However, paleo-detectors could measure the time-integrated flux of neutrinos from galactic core-collapse supernovae via flavor-blind neutral current interactions.