Stochasticity and efficiency of convection-dominated vs. SASI-dominated supernova explosions

Abstract

We present an initial report on 160 simulations of a highly simplified model of the post-bounce supernova environment in three position space dimensions (3D). We set different values of a parameter characterizing the impact of nuclear dissociation at the stalled shock in order to regulate the post-shock fluid velocity, thereby determining the relative importance of convection and the stationary accretion shock instability (SASI). While our convection-dominated runs comport with the paradigmatic notion of a `critical neutrino luminosity' for explosion at a given mass accretion rate (albeit with a nontrivial spread in explosion times just above threshold), the outcomes of our SASI-dominated runs are more stochastic: a sharp threshold critical luminosity is `smeared out' into a rising probability of explosion over a $sim 20%$ range of luminosity. We also find that the SASI-dominated models are able to explode with 3 to 4 times less efficient neutrino heating, indicating that progenitor properties, and fluid and neutrino microphysics, conducive to the SASI would make the neutrino-driven explosion mechanism more robust.