Orateur
Description
Nature has provided us with powerful neutrino sources, with explosive or violent events, such as core-collapse supernovae that mark the end of the life of massive stars, or binary compact object mergers, like binary neutron star mergers. Neutrinos are intriguing elementary particles with mixings, that weakly interact with matter, which makes them unique messengers of events far in space and time. While neutrinos have already played a remarkable role historically in shaping, since the premises of neutrino astronomy, fundamental knowledge, they keep having a unique role in astrophysical and cosmological environments.
In this talk, I will highlight the impact neutrinos have on longstanding open issues such as on the core-collapse supernova explosion mechanism, or on nucleosynthesis processes e.g. the r-process, in relation with supernovae and binary neutron-star merger remnants. I will mention the fact that understanding how neutrinos change flavor in such dense environments is still an open problem. I will discuss the crucial role of future observations, also for the search for new physics. Interestingly, neutrinos from supernovae and binary neutron-star mergers have many similarities with neutrinos in the early Universe, in particular at the MeV epoch.
Finally, I will emphasize the importance of discovering the diffuse supernova background from past supernova explosions, which will open a new window in low energy neutrino astrophysics and will constitute a unique laboratory for astrophysics, neutrino physics and the search for new physics. As for the cosmological neutrino background, its observation remains extremely challenging.
