Supernova Nucleosynthesis, Radioactive Nuclear Reactions and Neutrino-Mass Hierarchy

¹ School of Physics & International Research Center for Big-Bang Cosmology and Element Genesis, Beihang University, Beijing 100083, China
² National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588, Japan
³ Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, “Ettore Majorana” University of Catania, Catania, Italy
⁵ Center for Nuclear Study, The University of Tokyo, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan

^* e-mail: sternyao@buaa.edu.cn
^** e-mail: kusakabe@buaa.edu.cn
^*** e-mail: kajino@buaa.edu.cn
^**** e-mail: cherubini@lns.infn.it
^† e-mail: hayakawa@cns.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
^‡ e-mail: yamag@cns.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Published online: 24 February 2022

Abstract

The ν-process nucleosynthesis in core-collapse supernovae is a sensitive probe of unknown neutrino mass hierarchy through the MSW effect. We carefully studied the uncertainties of almost one hundred ν-induced and nuclear reactions associated with the nucleosynthesis and found that the ν-¹⁶O and ¹¹C(α,p)¹⁴N reactions among them have the biggest effect on the final ⁷Li/¹¹B isotopic abundance ratio. The neutrino mass hierarchy is constrained in our nucleosynthetic method with measured ⁷Li/¹¹B value in SiC-X presolar grains. The inverted hierarchy is statistically more favored at the 2-σ C.L. [1].