Speaker
Description
Neutrinos emerge promptly from the cores of collapsing massive stars and are the most direct messengers of the microphysics that drives stellar core collapse. Owing to their small interaction cross-sections, they propagate with negligible attenuation, so their time- and energy-dependent flux records the full evolution from shock formation to the birth of a neutron star, or, if accretion continues, a black hole. Recent advances in detector sensitivity, background suppression, and light-curve modeling now permit quantitative analysis of this signal, turning the next Galactic burst into a laboratory for strong-gravity and dense-matter physics.
In this talk, I introduce a simulation-calibrated analytical model that reproduces both the prompt flash and the longer cooling tail of the neutrino light curve. Tests with synthetic data show that, even with a single water Cherenkov detector, one can extract key source parameters such as the remnant’s mass, radius, and binding energy, and distinguish gradual neutron-star cooling from the abrupt cutoff that marks black-hole formation. The same framework converts the burst into an independent distance indicator and places meaningful limits on nuclear equations of state. These capabilities demonstrate that data-driven neutrino astronomy can now provide precise, model-constrained insights into gravitational collapse and the formation of compact objects.
