Abstract Proposal

Due to ever improving hydrodynamic simulations, our understanding of how massive stars explode allows us to make increasingly confident predictions of the neutrino burst signal from the next supernova in our Galaxy. With this signal we hope to answer the many outstanding questions about the core dynamics of a supernova and the shockwave that propagates through the star. But first, we must be able to decode these signals, which requires understanding the flavor oscillation that occurs as the neutrinos propagate towards Earth. We propose a computational analysis that uses the density and neutrino information of a particular hydrodynamical supernova model to predict the neutrino signals that would be detected. Our calculations will take into account flavor oscillations that occur due to collective flavor effects and the evolution of the Mikheyev, Smirnov & Wolfstein (MSW) conversion, and we will test both normal and inverted neutrino mass hierarchies. Our goal is to test whether shockwaves in supernovae can be observed in current and next generation neutrino detectors and what information we may be able to extract.