IAP weekly specialised seminars / 26 January 2024
Sonia El Hedri (Laboratoire AstroParticule et Comologie, Université Paris Cité, France)
Core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) are important actors in the dynamics of galaxies but their underlying mechanism is still only partially understood. The detection of neutrinos from SN1987A confirmed that these particles play a key role in supernova explosions and that their detection would provide a complete recording of the behavior of the core of the star during the collapse. Moreover, CCSN neutrinos could be detected minutes to hours before the electromagnetic signal, thus providing an advance warning for telescopes. However, the CCSN detection range of current and upcoming neutrino experiments only covers our Galaxy and its immediate neighborhood, where supernovae take place only 2-3 times per century. The rarity and unpredictability of close-by supernovae has motivated the development of CCSN search strategies at a wide variety of neutrino detectors, sometimes extending their nominal energy range. Furthermore, a centralized real time analysis system, the Supernova Early Warning System (SNEWS), has been developed in order to combine observations from multiple experiments and send relevant information to telescopes within minutes after a CCSN neutrino detection. This colloquium will illustrate the current challenges of CCSN neutrino detection through two topics. First, I will describe the CCSN search program of the KM3NeT neutrino experiment, originally aimed at studying neutrino oscillations and high-energy neutrinos from cosmic ray sources. Second, I will describe how to locate a supernova using neutrino observations, and will show how exploiting novel features of next-generation neutrino and dark matter experiments could improve SNEWS’s current strategies.
