Impacts of Rotation on Three-dimensional Hydrodynamics of Core-collapse Supernovae

We perform a series of simplified numerical experiments to explore how rotation impacts the three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamics of core-collapse supernovae. For our systematic study, we employ a light-bulb scheme to trigger explosions and a three-flavor neutrino leakage scheme to treat deleptonization effects and neutrino losses from the proto-neutron-star interior. Using a 15 M _⊙ progenitor, we compute 30 models in 3D with a wide variety of initial angular momentum and light-bulb neutrino luminosity. We find that the rotation can help the onset of neutrino-driven explosions for the models in which the initial angular momentum is matched to that obtained in recent stellar evolutionary calculations (~0.3-3 rad s^-1 at the center). For the models with larger initial angular momentum, the shock surface deforms to be more oblate due to larger centrifugal force. This not only makes the gain region more concentrated around the equatorial plane, but also makes the mass larger in the gain region. As a result, buoyant bubbles tend to be coherently formed and rise in the equatorial region, which pushes the revived shock toward ever larger radii until a global explosion is triggered. We find that these are the main reasons that the preferred direction of the explosion in 3D rotating models is often perpendicular to the spin axis, which is in sharp contrast to the polar explosions around the axis that were obtained in previous two-dimensional simulations.