New possibilities in supernova accretion phase from dense matter effect

Abstract

We carry out a detailed analysis of the supernova (SN) neutrino flavor evolution during the accretion phase (at post-bounce times tpb ≤ 500 ms), characterizing the SN ν signal by recent hydrodynamical simulations. We find that trajectory-dependent multi-angle effects, associated with the dense ordinary matter suppress collective oscillations, that would have been induced by ν-ν interactions in the deepest SN regions. The matter suppression implies that neutrino oscillations will start outside the neutrino decoupling region and therefore will have a negligible impact on the neutrino heating and the explosion dynamics. Furthermore, the possible detection of the next galactic SN neutrino signal from the accretion phase, based on the usual Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effect in the SN mantle and Earth matter effects, can reveal the neutrino mass hierarchy in the likely case that the mixing angle θ13 is not very small.