The impact of vorticity waves on the shock dynamics in core-collapse supernovae

Abstract

Convective perturbations arising from nuclear shell burning can play an important role in propelling neutrino-driven core-collapse supernova explosions. In this work, we analyze the impact of vorticity waves on the shock dynamics and the post-shock flow using the solution of the linear hydrodynamics equations. We show that the entropy perturbations generated by the interaction of the shock with vorticity waves may play a dominant role in generating buoyancy-driven turbulence in the gain region. We estimate that the resulting reduction in the critical luminosity is 17-24%, which approximately agrees with the results of three-dimensional neutrino-hydrodynamics simulations.