English

Direct anthropic bound on the weak scale from supernovae explosions

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2019-10-23 v2 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Core-collapse supernovae presumably explode because trapped neutrinos push the material out of the stellar envelope. This process is directly controlled by the weak scale vv: we argue that supernova explosions happen only if fundamental constants are tuned within a factor of few as vΛQCD3/4MPl1/4v \sim \Lambda_{\rm QCD}^{3/4} M_{\rm Pl}^{1/4}, such that neutrinos are trapped in supernovae for a time comparable to the gravitational time-scale. We provide analytic arguments and simulations in spherical approximation, that need to be validated by more comprehensive simulations. The above result can be important for fundamental physics, because core-collapse supernova explosions seem anthropically needed, as they spread intermediate-mass nuclei presumably necessary for `life'. We also study stellar burning, finding that it does not provide anthropic boundaries on vv.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.00986,
  title  = {Direct anthropic bound on the weak scale from supernovae explosions},
  author = {Guido D'Amico and Alessandro Strumia and Alfredo Urbano and Wei Xue},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.00986},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

26 pages, 8 figures, to appear on PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:39:44.325Z