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[30.05] Analysis of the Nature and Growth Rates of Fluid Instabilities in Core Collapse Supernovae

E. A. Raley, S. W. Bruenn (Florida Atlantic University)

Very massive stars die in violent supernova explosions. However, when modeling these explosions, the shock wave that fuels the explosion most often stalls. Fluid instabilities may arise below the neutrinoshpere which will advect neutrinos from opaque regions deep in the core to the semitransparent regions near the neutrinoshpere. By enhancing the neutrino emission, these instabilities could play a role in the explosion mechanism by helping to revive the shock wave.

Neutrino energy and lepton transport can change the nature of the fluid instabilities from Rayleigh-Taylor to doubly diffusive. In order to characterize the doubly diffusive instabilities arising in core collapse supernova models and assess their role in modifying neutrino transport, the nature and growth rates of these instabilities were found for a variety of thermodynamic conditions of density, entropy, and lepton fraction. These calculations were made with several different classes of perturbation, for two different equations of state, and for traditional and recently improved neutrino opacities.

Stability regions are plotted as functions of the outward gradients, dlns/dz and dlny_l/dz, where s is entropy, y_l is lepton fraction, and z is the outward direction.

This work is partially supported by TSI funding from the D.O.E. Department of Science.

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35 #3
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.