Back reaction of Einstein’s gravitational waves as the origin of natal pulsar kicks

Abstract

At the early core bounce of a supernova collapse rapid convective overturn along with gradients in density and temperature in the neutrino-decoupling zone drives anisotropic neutrino flux. If then active-to-sterile $({\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\overline{\ensuremath{\tau}},\overline{\ensuremath{\mu}}}\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{s})$ neutrino oscillations in the dense core take place, gravitational radiation should be emitted the entire oscillation length. Since the oscillation feeds mass energy up into (or drains it from) the new species, the large neutrino mass-squared difference ${(10}^{4}$ ${\mathrm{eV}}^{2}\ensuremath{\lesssim}\ensuremath{\Delta}{m}^{2}\ensuremath{\lesssim}{10}^{8}$ ${\mathrm{eV}}^{2})$ implies that a huge amount of energy is released as gravity waves. This gravitational waves luminosity is larger than the one from either neutrino convection and cooling or perturbed matter distributions. I identify the back-reaction force (mass and current multipoles) of the gravitational wave burst generated over the oscillation time scale as the pulsar thruster.