High Energy Physics Seminar

Neutrinos not only play essential roles in cooling the interiors of massive stars, but also serve as potential signatures of their evolution towards the eventual core collapse and supernova (SN) explosion. With the next generation of detectors such as the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) under construction, there is growing interest in detecting pre-SN neutrinos. It is plausible to detect such neutrinos from a star within a few kpc a few days before its explosion. I will focus on the possibility of using pre-SN neutrinos to determine the yet-unknown neutrino mass hierarchy with JUNO. I will also discuss the effects of additional cooling due to the emission of dark photon, a dark matter candidate particle, on the evolution of a massive star. The resulting modifications of the pre-SN neutrino signal can be a potential probe of the dark photon properties.

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