Improved neutrino-nucleon interactions in dense and hot matter for numerical simulations
Micaela Oertel, A Pascal, Marco Mancini, J. Novák
Abstract
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.