Large-Scale Convection during Gravitational Collapse with Neutrino Transport in 2D and 3D Models on Fine Grids

Abstract

The problem of the gravitational collapse of the core of a massive star is considered, taking into account the neutrino transport in the flux-limited diffusion approximation. To reduce the computational domain of a multidimensional problem on a fixed computational grid, the core of a star, which is already at the stage of collapse, is considered. Since the collapse stage is delayed in time compared to the gas-dynamic time scale for an emerging proto-neutron star, we consider the mathematical problem for the initial configuration in equilibrium and neglected the initial radial velocity. Pressure for a long time at the collapse stage is provided by relativistic degenerate electrons, so the relationship between pressure and density in the initial configuration is described by a polytropic equation with the polytropic index n=3. The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis that large-scale convection is independent of the 2D and 3D geometry of the mathematical problem and computational grid parameters, as well as the choice of the initial stage of gravitational collapse. The scale of convection is determined by the size of the region of decreasing entropy with neutrino losses, i.e., nonequilibrium neutronization, and the presence of a weak initial rotation.