University of Pennsylvania
Department of Physics and Astronomy
High Energy Physics Seminar
Apr. 20 at 1:30


Abstract:
Neutrinos from the Next Galactic Supernova


There is great current interest in the physics of neutrinos, especially given the recent results on atmospheric neutrinos that seem to confirm mass and mixing. Important further clues about neutrinos are likely to come from astrophysics, in particular from the next Galactic supernova. Core-collapse supernovae emit of order $10^{58}$ neutrinos and antineutrinos of all flavors over several seconds, with average energies of 10--25 MeV. I will discuss what some present neutrino detectors will observe, and what we will learn from these measurements. In particular, I will consider the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), for which several hundred events are expected from a future supernova at 10 kpc. From these events, it will be possible to probe tau neutrino masses a million times smaller than the current limit from accelerator studies. This seems to be the best possibility for direct determination of a mu or tau neutrino mass within the range interesting to cosmology and particle physics. Finally, I will also discuss the problem of locating a supernova by its neutrinos.