Neutrinos in Stellar Astrophysics
Abstract
The physics of the mysterious and stealthy neutrino is at the heart of many phenomena in the cosmos. These particles interact with matter and with each other through the aptly named weak interaction. At typical astrophysical energies the weak interaction is some twenty orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic interaction. However, in the early universe and in collapsing stars neutrinos can more than make up for their feeble interaction strength with huge numbers. Neutrinos can dominate the dynamics in these sites and set the conditions that govern the synthesis of the elements. Here we journey through the history of the discovery of these particles and describe their role in stellar evolution and collapse, the big bang, and multi-messenger astrophysics. Neutrino physics is at the frontier of elementary particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology. All of these fields overlap in the neutrino story.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2208.08050,
title = {Neutrinos in Stellar Astrophysics},
author = {G. M. Fuller and W. C. Haxton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.08050},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
45 pages, 14 figures; To be published in Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, edited by F. W. Stecker, in the Encyclopedia of Cosmology II, edited by G. G. Fazio, World Scientific Publishing Company, Singapore, 2022. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1209.3743, arXiv:0808.0735; two additional references added to v2