Kinetic theory based modeling of Type II core collapse supernovae

Abstract

Motivated by the success of kinetic theory in the description of observables in intermediate and high energy heavy ion collisions, we use kinetic theory to model the dynamics of core collapse supernovae. The specific way that we employ kinetic theory to solve the relevant transport equations allows us to explicitly model the propagation of neutrinos and a full ensemble of nuclei and treat neutrino-matter interactions in a very general way. With these abilities, our preliminary calculations have observed dynamics that may prove to be an entirely new neutrino capture induced supernova explosion mechanism.