Final Abstract

Due to ever improving hydrodynamic simulations, our understanding of how massive stars explode has allowed 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 through the star and towards Earth. We present a computational analysis that uses the density and neutrino information of three 1-D hydrodynamic supernova models to predict the neutrino signals that would be detected in three different types of detectors. Our calculations take into account flavor oscillations caused by collective flavor effects and the evolution of the Mikheyev, Smirnov & Wolfstein (MSW) conversion, and we test both normal and inverted neutrino mass hierarchies. We demonstrate how the presence of the shockwave leaves an imprint in the spectral event rates of these detectors, which might be used to test the delayed explosion paradigm, and how the total neutral current event rates versus time can be used to determine the cooling rate of the proto neutron star.