Powerful gravitational-wave bursts from supernova neutrino oscillations

Abstract

During supernova core collapse and bounce resonant active-to-active, as well as active-to-sterile, neutrino ($\nu$) oscillations can take place. Over this phase weak magnetism increases antineutrino mean free paths, and thus its luminosity. Because oscillations feed mass-energy into the target $\nu$ species, the large mass-squared difference between $\nu$ states implies a huge amount of power to be given off as gravitational waves (GWs) due to the universal {\it spin-rotation} and the spin-magnetic coupling driven $\nu$ anisotropic flow, which is coherent over the oscillation length. The spacetime strain produced is about two orders of magnitude larger than those from $\nu$ difussion or neutron star matter anisotropies. GWs observatories as LIGO, VIRGO, GEO-600, TAMA-300, etc., can search for these bursts far out to the VIRGO cluster of galaxies.