Skyrme-RPA study of charged-current neutrino opacity in hot and dense supernova matter

Studies of neutrino emission and interactions in core collapse supernova are crucial to our understanding of the explosion mechanism. The charged-current processes  ν_e + n → p + e^- and ν̅_e + p →  n + e⁺ are mainly responsible for depositing energy behind the stalled shock front and thus reviving the explosion.  The same processes are the main opacity sources for determining the thermal decoupling of ν_e and ν̅_e, from the protoneutron star, and hence, their emission energy spectra.

Neutrino absorption and their transport of energy to the shock region are sensitive to the physics of hot and dense nucleon matter, which is a complex problem due to the strong correlations induced by nuclear forces. We derive the charged current opacities for electron neutrinos and antineutrinos in supernova matter using a self-consistent  approach based on the Skyrme effective interaction. We include mean field energy shift due to nuclear interaction and corrections due to RPA correlations. To test the effect of RPA corrections, neutrino and  antineutrino opacities are computed using different Skyrme parametrizations consistent  with a number of infinite matter constraints.