Neutrinos from Early‐Phase, Pulsar‐driven Supernovae

Neutron stars, just after their formation, are surrounded by expanding,dense, and very hot envelopes which radiate thermal photons. Iron nuclei can beaccelerated in the wind zones of such energetic pulsars to very high energies.These nuclei photo-disintegrate and their products lose energy efficiently incollisions with thermal photons and with the matter of the envelope, mainly viapion production. When the temperature of the radiation inside the envelope ofthe supernova drops below $\sim 3\times 10^6$ K, these pions decay beforelosing energy and produce high energy neutrinos. We estimate the flux of muonneutrinos emitted during such an early phase of the pulsar - supernova envelopeinteraction. We find that a 1 km$^2$ neutrino detector should be able to detectneutrinos above 1 TeV within about one year after the explosion from asupernova in our Galaxy. This result holds if these pulsars are able toefficiently accelerate nuclei to energies $\sim 10^{20}$ eV, as postulatedrecently by some authors for models of Galactic acceleration of the extremelyhigh energy cosmic rays (EHE CRs).Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, revised version submitted to Ap