Effects of the temperature dependence of the in-medium nucleon mass on core-collapse supernovae

¹ Institut d’Astronomie et d’Astrophysique, CP226, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
e-mail: afantina@ulb.ac.be
² CEA, DAM, DIF, 91297 Arpajon, France
e-mail: patrick.blottiau@cea.fr
³ Laboratoire Univers et Théories, Observatoire de Paris, CNRS, 92190 Meudon, France
⁴ Institut de Physique Nucléaire, Université Paris-Sud, IN2P3-CNRS, 91406 Orsay Cedex, France
⁵ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Milano, and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Milano, via Celoria 16, 20133 Milano, Italy

Received: 30 September 2011
Accepted: 3 February 2012

Abstract

Aims. A complete description of the core collapse supernova mechanism requires an appropriate treatment of both the hydrodynamics and the microphysics. We study the influence of a nuclear physics input, namely the temperature dependence of the nucleon effective mass in nuclei induced by the in-medium effects, in the core collapse of a massive star.

Methods. We present here the first implementation of this nuclear input in a hydrodynamical one-dimensional simulation. The simulations are performed with a spherically symmetric Newtonian model, with neutrino transport treated in the multi-group flux-limited diffusion approximation.

Results. The inclusion of the temperature dependence of the in-medium nucleon mass has an impact on the equation of state of the system and reduces the deleptonisation during the collapse. This results in a non-negligible effect on the shock wave energetics. The shock wave is formed more outwards, and in the first few milliseconds after bounce the shock front has propagated further out.