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Published January 20, 2015 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

The Role of Turbulence in Neutrino-Driven Core-Collapse Supernova Explosions

Abstract

The neutrino-heated "gain layer" immediately behind the stalled shock in a core-collapse supernova is unstable to high-Reynolds-number turbulent convection. We carry out and analyze a new set of 19 high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) simulations with a three-species neutrino leakage/heating scheme and compare with spherically-symmetric (1D) and axisymmetric (2D) simulations carried out with the same methods. We study the postbounce supernova evolution in a 15-M_⊙ progenitor star and vary the local neutrino heating rate, the magnitude and spatial dependence of asphericity from convective burning in the Si/O shell, and spatial resolution. Our simulations suggest that there is a direct correlation between the strength of turbulence in the gain layer and the susceptability to explosion. 2D and 3D simulations explode at much lower neutrino heating rates than 1D simulations. This is commonly explained by the fact that nonradial dynamics allows accreting material to stay longer in the gain layer. We show that this explanation is incomplete. Our results indicate that the effective turbulent ram pressure exerted on the shock plays a crucial role by allowing multi-D models to explode at a lower postshock thermal pressure and thus with less neutrino heating than 1D models. We connect the turbulent ram pressure with turbulent energy at large scales and in this way explain why 2D simulations are erroneously exploding more easily than 3D simulations.

Additional Information

© 2015 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 August 6; Accepted 2014 November 3; Published 2015 January 9. The authors thank David Radice and Ernazar Abdikamalov for help with the computation of the numerical Reynolds number. The authors acknowledge further helpful discussions with W. David Arnett, Adam Burrows, Evan O'Connor, Uschi C. T. Gamma, Carlo Graziani, Philipp Mösta, Christian Reisswig, Luke Roberts, and Petros Tzeferacos. S.M.C. is supported by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant No. 51286.01 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute and by NSF grant No. AST-0909132. C.D.O. is partially supported by NSF grant Nos. AST-1212170, PHY-1151197, and OCI-0905046, by a grant from the Institute of Geophysics, Planetary Physics, and Signatures at Los Alamos National Laboratory, by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The software used in this work was in part developed by the DOE NNSA-ASC OASCR Flash Center at the University of Chicago. The simulations were carried out on computational resources at ALCF at ANL, which is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357, on the NSF XSEDE network under computer time allocation TG-PHY100033, and on the NCSA Blue Waters supercomputer under NSF PRAC grant No. ACI-1440083.

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Submitted - 1408.1399v2.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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