Joint HEP/Theory Seminar: Toward an understanding of neutrino flavor mixing in core-collapse supernovae

The detection of neutrinos from the next galactic core-collapse
supernova (CCSN) has become almost a certainty. However, most modern
simulations of core-collapse supernovae still do not include neutrino
flavor mixing, due to uncertainties in the fundamental physics and
limited computational resources. The role of neutrino flavor mixing in
the explosion mechanism and the expected observed neutrino signal are
thus not fully understood. I will present our current effort to
include the effects of neutrino flavor mixing in the FLASH supernova
code using an approximation to the full quantum kinetic equations. I
will also discuss the prospects of what can be learned about flavor
mixing from observations of the next galactic CCSN. With a better
understanding of both flavor mixing in the CCSN environment and how to
interpret observations, we can use neutrino detections as a way to
probe the CCSN environment and constrain fundamental neutrino physics.