Speaker
Description
Speaker: Yago Porto
Abstract:Supernova neutrinos are often described as an exceptionally informative signal, but what a nearby Galactic event will certainly provide is not information itself, but data. Whether high-statistics data can be converted into reliable physical inference depends on how strongly the interpretation relies on detailed source modeling. In this talk, I will discuss three observables designed to remain meaningful under minimal assumptions about the supernova source: the neutronization burst, whose origin is controlled by simple weak-interaction physics; the flavor composition at Earth, which can be constrained through coarse-grained multi-detector flavor measurements; and the gamma-ray echo, which can act as an astrophysical near detector for the post-conversion
fluence at the stellar surface. Together, these examples show how the next Galactic supernova could be used not only to collect a large data set, but to perform robust consistency checks and potentially identify unexpected neutrino physics even with limited knowledge of the source.