A systematic study of the explosion energy issue in core collapse supernova theory
Abstract
Massive stars with main sequence masses greater than 8 solar mass (Msun) the main target of CCSNe researches. According to initial mass function (IMF) they occupy about 15As a matter of fact, supernova theorists have failed to reproduce this energetic stellar explosion for about a half century because micro and macro physics are highly complex and are mutual influenced. The theoretical investigation of the explosion mechanism is based on numerical simulations, which will ultimately require computational sources of exsa scales. With recent remarkable developments both in hardware and software, however, more realistic physics are incorporated and research group are beginning to overcome the difficulties, reporting successful explosions in their numerical models. The successful is still partial, unfortunately, since in the most of the cases the explosion energy hardly reaches the typical value (10^51erg). What is worse other groups found no explosion for almost same setups. The robust explosion mechanism has not yet been ascertained and is still a remaining issue. The purpose of this paper is to study how far our understanding of "neutrino heating mechanism", the current paradigm, has reached, or put another way, to expose what kind of physics are still missing to explain observations , such as explosion energy and nickel mass. As already remarked the physics in CCSNe are quite complicated with extremely high Reynolds number, highly uncertain equation of state (EOS) at supra-nuclear densities, copious neutrinos not in thermal nor chemical equilibrium with matter normally. I believe that it is justified to devote a somewhat large number of pages to the introduction. It will be also helpful for understanding the motivation of this paper. Starting with evidence from supernova light curves I will then move to the basics idea of neutrino heating mechanism and summarize some recent developments in various micro and macro physics. Key factors in the theory of massive-star evolutions are also illuminated in the introduction. Other important ingredients that are not directly related with the thesis, such as numerical treatments of neutrino transport, are given in appendices. To find the missing pieces of the current CCSNe theory, I employed an experimental way instead of running "realistic" simulations. In fact, I conducted experimental computations systematically so as to reveal (1) what is the necessary condition of the canonical explosion energy (2) what is the dominant contribution to the explosion energy (3) when the explosion energy is settled to the final value, and, finally, (4) features in pre-explosion structure of the progenitor are critical for the explosion energy. In this paper I paid particular attention to nuclear energies released in association with the production of various elements up to A 56, which are likely to contribute to the energetics of CCSNe. I performed multi-dimension hydrodynamic simulations that can also handle the evolution of elements in both nuclear statistical equilibrium (NSE) and non-equilibrium, taking particular care of transition from one to the other. We take a multi-step strategy: collapse, shock revival and the subsequent evolution until the settlement of explosion energy are treated separately and consecutively; the collapse phase is calculated under spherical symmetry to obtain mass accretion histories for different progenitors; in so doing, the inner part of the core is removed and replaced with the artificial inner boundary; the second phase treats shock revival; we construct steady accretion flows through the stalled shock wave on to the proto neutron star; using these configurations as initial conditions for 1D and 2D simulations, we determine the critical neutrino luminosities for shock revival; the evolutions that follow the shock revival are computed in the last phase, with the mass accretion histories obtained in the first phase being taken into account. In the first of two studies done for the thesis we used a single progenitor of 15Msun provided by a realistic stellar evolution calculation and studied the post-shock revival evolutions, changing the time of shock revival. We run seven 1D and five 2D models. In the second exploration, on the other hand, we pay attention to the progenitor dependence of the dynamics. Instead of using progenitor models from realistic stellar evolution calculations, I construct six pre-collapse models with different masses of Fe core and Si+S layer assuming entropy and electron fraction distributions and varying rather arbitrarily the parameters included. Unlike in the first study, we did not specify the shock revival time explicitly but gave the neutrino luminosity in this study. The explosion energy and nickel mass are calculated for eighteen 1D and eight 2D models, respectively. The two studies demonstrate that early explosions are necessary for strong explosions. It is also found that nuclear recombination energy is a major contributor to the explosion energy which is settled to the final value in 500ms whereas the nickel mass needs much longer times to reach the final value, particularly in 2D. Since the nickel tends to be overproduced in early explosions, enhanced fallbacks in multi-dimensional hydrodynamics seem to be crucial to reproduce the observed values of nickel mass and explosion energy simultaneously. As for the progenitor dependence, we found that light cores with relatively high entropies seem to be favorable for reproducing the canonical explosion by the neutrino heating mechanism. It is interesting that the explosion energy is strongly correlated with the mass accretion rate at shock revival regardless of the spatial dimensions.
- Publication:
-
Ph.D. Thesis
- Pub Date:
- June 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016PhDT........70Y