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
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.
A review of neutrino astrophysics is presented, including solar and atmospheric neutrinos; neutrino mass and oscillations; the supernova mechanism, supernova neutrino production, and associated nucleosynthesis; cosmological neutrinos and Big Bang nucleosynthesis; neutrino cooling and associated limits on neutrino properties; and high-energy astrophysical neutrinos.
We summarize the progress in neutrino astrophysics and emphasize open issues in our understanding of neutrino flavor conversion in media. We discuss solar neutrinos, core-collapse supernova neutrinos and conclude with ultra-high energy neutrinos.
Neutrinos are produced by a variety of sources that comprise our Sun, explosive environments such as core-collapse supernovae, the Earth and the Early Universe. The precise origin of the recently discovered ultra-high energy neutrinos is to be determined yet. These weakly interacting particles give us information on their sources, although the neutrino fluxes can be modified when neutrinos traverse an astrophysical environment. Here we highlight recent advances in neutrino astrophysics and emphasise the important progress in our understanding of neutrino flavour conversion in media.
Neutrino scattering at low energies is essential for a variety of timely applications potentially having fundamental implications, e.g. unraveling unknown neutrino properties, such as the third neutrino mixing angle, the detection of the diffuse supernova neutrino background, or of cosmological neutrinos and furnishing a new constraint to double-beta decay calculations. Here we discuss some applications, the present status and the perspectives.
I review the current status of neutrino astrophysics, including solar neutrinos; atmospheric neutrinos; neutrino mass and oscillations; supernova neutrinos; neutrino nucleosynthesis (Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the neutrino process, the r-process); neutrino cooling and red giants; and high energy neutrino astronomy.
We highlight recent advances in neutrino astrophysics, the open issues and the interplay with neutrino properties. We emphasize the important progress in our understanding of neutrino flavor conversion in media. We discuss the case of solar neutrinos, of core-collapse supernova neutrinos and of SN1987A, and of the recently discovered ultra-high energy neutrinos whose origin is to be determined.
The third neutrino mixing angle theta13 is the least known one. In this contribution, after a brief discussion of the current efforts to determine the value of this angle better, various astrophysical implications of a non-zero value of theta13 are summarized.
The connection between neutrino physics, nucleosynthesis of elements in astrophysical sites, laboratory measurements with rare exotic nuclei and astronomical observations is discussed. The key role played by neutrinos is emphasized and the close connection between neutrino physics and nucleosynthesis is highlighted.
For a long time very little experimental information was available about neutrino properties, even though a minute neutrino mass has intriguing cosmological and astrophysical implications. This situation has changed in recent decades: intense experimental activity to measure many neutrino properties took place. Some of these developments and their implications for astrophysics and cosmology are briefly reviewed with a particular emphasis on neutrino magnetic moments and collective neutrino oscillations
We briefly review the recent developments in neutrino physics and astrophysics which have import for frontline research in nuclear physics. These developments, we argue, tie nuclear physics to exciting developments in observational cosmology and astrophysics in new ways. Moreover, the behavior of neutrinos in dense matter is itself a fundamental problem in many-body quantum mechanics, in some ways akin to well-known issues in nuclear matter and nuclei, and in some ways radically different, especially because of nonlinearity and quantum de-coherence. The self-interacting neutrino gas is the onl…
Neutrinos play a crucial role in many aspects of astrophysics and cosmology. Since they control the electron fraction, or equivalently neutron-to-proton ratio, neutrino properties impact yields of r-process nucleosynthesis. Similarly the weak decoupling temperature in the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis epoch is exponentially dependent on the neutron-to-proton ratio. In these conference proceedings, I briefly summarize some of the recent work exploring the role of neutrinos in astrophysics and cosmology.
In this brief review we explore the role of neutrino-nucleus interactions in core-collapse supernovae and discuss open questions. In addition implications of neutrino mass and mixings in such environments are summarized.
We review the relevance of neutrino-nucleus interactions at energy transfers below 100 MeV for accelerator-based experiments, experiments at lower energies and for astrophysical neutrinos. The impact of low-energy scattering processes in the energy reconstruction analysis of oscillation experiments is investigated. We discuss the modeling of coherent scattering processes and compare its strength to that of inelastic interactions. The presented results are obtained within a continuum random phase approximation approach.
This review covers a subset of the astrophysical phenomena where neutrinos play a significant role and where the underlying microphysics is nuclear physics. The current status of the solar neutrino problem, atmospheric neutrino experiments, the role of neutrinos in determining the dynamics of type-II supernovae, and recent developments in exploring neutrino propagation in stochastic media are reviewed.
Neutrino astronomy is on the verge of discovering new sources, and this will lead to important advances in astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, and nuclear physics. This paper is meant for non-experts, so that they might better understand the basic issues in this field.
Even the elusive neutrinos are trapped in matter, albeit transiently, in several astrophysical circumstances. Their interactions with the ambient matter not only reveal the properties of such exotic matter itself, but also shed light on the fundamental properties of the neutrinos themselves. The physical sites of interest include the early universe, supernovae, and newly-born neutron stars. Detection of neutrinos from these vastly different eras using the new generation of neutrino detectors holds great promise for enhancing our understanding of neutrino-matter interactions and astrophysical p…
If neutrinos have self-interactions, these will induce scatterings between astrophysical and cosmic neutrinos. Prior work proposed to look for possible resulting resonance features in astrophysical neutrino spectra in order to seek a neutrino self-interaction which can be either diagonal in the neutrino flavor space or couple different neutrino flavors. The calculation of the astrophysical spectra involves either a Monte Carlo simulation or a computationally intensive numerical integration of an integro-partial-differential equation. As a result only limited regions of the neutrino self-intera…
In this report, centered on the activities within the MURST-PRIN project "Fisica teorica del nucleo e dei sistemi a più corpi" we discuss recent advances on the following items: i)neutrinos as probes of the solar interior and of other astrophysical objects; ii)neutrinos as probes of physics beyond the Standard Model of electroweak interactions; iii)the role of nuclear physics in i) and ii); iv) who is doing what within the italian network; v)future projects.
Astrophysical environments that reach temperatures greater than $\sim$ 100 keV can have significant neutrino energy loss via both plasma processes and nuclear weak interactions. We find that nuclear processes likely produce the highest-energy neutrinos. Among the important weak nuclear interactions are both charged current channels (electron capture/emission and positron capture/emission) and neutral current channels (de-excitation of nuclei via neutrino pair emission). We show that in order to make a realistic prediction of the nuclear neutrino spectrum, one must take nuclear structure into a…
