Spontaneous lepton-number violation and de-leptonization in stellar collapse

Abstract

We consider core collapse in weak interaction models where global lepton-number invariance is spontaneously broken. We find that the initial neutrino number prevents finite temperature restoration of lepton-number conservation. Assuming the lepton-number violating reactions occur rapidly, we show that the neutrino number is driven to a sufficiently small value to allow electron capture reactions to de-leptonize the core, and lead to a high-entropy collapse.