Development of an early warning method incorporating pre-supernova neutrino light curves
Abstract
Massive stars () emit neutrinos known as pre-supernova (pre-SN) neutrinos through thermal and nuclear interactions for cooling the stellar core during the final stage of stellar evolution. Real-time monitoring of their pre-SN neutrino interaction rate offers a crucial opportunity to issue an early warning to a core-collapse supernova. Some neutrino detectors, including KamLAND and Super-Kamiokande already operate pre-SN alarm systems based on a statistically significant excess of the observed event rate over the expected background. To improve alarm sensitivity, we propose an alarm method which incorporates the time evolution of the observed pre-SN neutrino event rate. The method uses a log likelihood ratio test that references multiple theoretical stellar-evolution models and treats the core collapse time as a nuisance parameter to be profiled over. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using simulated data for the KamLAND, Super-Kamiokande with dissolved Gadolinium (SK-Gd) and their combined analysis. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in the warning time compared to the conventional rate-only method, while maintaining the same false alarm rate.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.15691,
title = {Development of an early warning method incorporating pre-supernova neutrino light curves},
author = {Keita Saito and Minori Eizuka and Zhuojun Hu and Koichi Ichimura and Motoyasu Ikeda and Koji Ishidoshiro and Nanami Kawada and Lucas N. Machado and Lluis Marti-Magro and Kazuha Mikami and Koga Tachibana and Roger A. Wendell},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.15691},
year = {2026}
}