Speaker
Description
Neutrino physics is essential for understanding a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. In particular, neutrinos play a fundamental role throughout the entire collapse of a massive star—from the supernova explosion and the early evolution of compact stellar remnants to neutron star cooling and neutron star mergers.
To calculate the opacity of nuclear matter to neutrinos, we employ the formalism developed by Iwamoto and Pethick, extending it beyond the Landau approximation.
Using a multipole expansion, we are able to compute the response function of dense nuclear matter for several families of effective nuclear interactions such as Skyrme, Gogny, and M3Y, including explicit tensor and spin orbit terms.
Following the methodology described in Ref.(Physical Review C—Nuclear Physics 2012, 86, 044308), we then evaluate the neutrino mean free path for different interactions, temperatures and densities of the nuclear medium.
In particular, finite-range interactions that incorporate both spin--orbit and tensor terms have not yet been explored in this context, while previous studies based on Skyrme interactions indicate that these two terms may lead to important reduction of the neutrino mean free path and thus alter the cooling mechanisms.
Using the same nucleon nucleon interaction to describe the various physical aspects of a neutron star will provide more stringent constraint on the determination of the coupling constant of the effective interaction that are also relevant for low energy nuclear physics