Analysis of fluid instabilities in core collapse supernova progenitors by a semi-analytical methodology and by two dimensional radiation-hydrodynamical simulations

We have performed an analysis of fluid instabilities below the neutrinospheres of the collapsed cores of supernova progenitors using a methodology introduced by Bruenn and Dineva [28, 29, 31]. In an extensive survey we found that the rate of lepton diffusion always exceeds the rate of thermal diffusion and as a result we do not anywhere see the neutron finger instability as described by the Livermore group [16, 17]. A new instability, lepto-entropy fingers, extending from a radius of 10--15 km out to the vicinity of the neutrinosphere, driven by the cross-response functions (i.e. the dependence of lepton transport on entropy perturbations and vice versa) was discovered. This instability has a maximum growth rate of the order of 100 s-1 with a scale of approximately 1/20 the distance of a perturbed fluid element from the core center [18]. This instability has probably already been seen in some multi-dimensional core collapse calculations. To test our results predicting the presence of doubly diffusive instabilities below the neutrinosphere of a proto-supernova, we have performed two dimensional hydrodynamic simulations with radial ray neutrino transport. This entailed rewriting RadHyd, which is the merger of EVH-1 hydrodynamics and MGFLD neutrino transport developed by Bruenn and DiNisco [43], for two dimensions. In particular, hydrodynamic evolution along angular arrays was included, as was MPI message passing capabilities, in order to utilize massively parallel computer platform such as FAU's BOCA4 Beowulf cluster. This work was partially funded by a grant from the DOE Office of Science, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program.