Planck 2016

Production of unstable heavy neutrinos in extreme astrophysical scenarios

24 may. 2016 12:10

20m

Contributed talk Astro/Cosmo/Neutrinos Astro-Neutrino 3

Descripción

We discuss the production of a class of heavy sterile neutrinos νh in proto-neutron stars. The neutrinos, of mass around 50 MeV, have a negligible mixing with the active species but relatively large dimension-5 electromagnetic couplings. In particular, a magnetic dipole moment μ ≈10−6 GeV^{−1}implies that they are thermally produced through e+e−→¯νh νh in the early phase of the core collapse, whereas a heavy–light transition moment μ_tr≈10−8 GeV^{−1} allows their decay νh→νi γ with a lifetime around 10^{−3} s. This type of electromagnetic couplings has been recently proposed to explain the excess of electron-like events in baseline experiments. We show that the production and decay of these heavy neutrinos would transport energy from the central regions of the star to distances d ≈400km, providing a very efficient mechanism to enhance the supernova shock front and heat the material behind it.