| Popis: |
It is now an experimental fact that neutrinos have mass and can transform their flavors. Though flavor-dependent neutrino interaction processes play pivotal roles in nearly every important aspect of the dynamics and heavy element nucleosynthesis associated with core collapse supernova events, neutrino flavor mixing has yet to be incorporated into supernova modeling in an organic fashion. This is worrisome, especially given that neutrino flavor inter-conversion can affect the flow of lepton number, entropy, and isospin throughout the regions of interest. Here I discuss how neutrinos might transform their flavors in the supernova environment and the possible implications of this for the explosion mechanism and for heavy element nucleosynthesis. Potentially even more revolutionary would be the existence of new kinds of neutrinos which mix with the known neutrinos. Such “sterile” neutrinos have not been revealed convincingly in the lab, though there are hints. The existence of light sterile neutrinos could completely alter the current core collapse supernova paradigm. |
