Neutrinos from Early‐Phase, Pulsar‐driven Supernovae

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Neutron stars, just after their formation, are surrounded by expanding, dense, and very hot envelopes that radiate thermal photons. Iron nuclei can be accelerated in the wind zones of such energetic pulsars to very high energies. These nuclei photodisintegrate, and their products lose energy efficiently in collisions with thermal photons and with the matter of the envelope, mainly via pion production. When the temperature of the radiation inside the envelope of the supernova drops below ~ 3 × 106 K, these pions decay before losing energy and produce high-energy neutrinos. We estimate the flux of muon neutrinos emitted during such an early phase of the pulsar-supernova envelope interaction. We find that a 1 km2 neutrino detector should be able to detect neutrinos above 1 TeV within about 1 yr after the explosion from a supernova in our Galaxy. This result holds if these pulsars are able to efficiently accelerate nuclei to energies ~1020 eV, as postulated recently by some authors for models of Galactic acceleration of the extremely high energy cosmic rays (EHE CRs).