High-energy neutrinos by hydrogen-rich supernovae interacting with low-massive circumstellar medium: the case of SN 2023ixf

ABSTRACT In hydrogen-rich (H-rich) supernova (SN) events, the collision between the H-rich ejecta and the circumstellar medium (CSM) can accelerate particles and produce high-energy neutrinos (HE-$\nu$, TeV–PeV) through proton–proton inelastic scattering. Despite understanding the production mechanism of these neutrinos, the lack of direct observations raises questions about particle acceleration efficiency and the involved astrophysical conditions. This study focuses on neutrino emission from H-rich SNe with low-mass CSM, such as SN 2023ixf. We developed a semi-analytical model to characterize the progenitor and CSM at the explosion time, allowing us to infer the expected neutrino flux at Earth during the SN’s interaction phase. Our model shows that neutrino emission depends not only on shock velocity and CSM mass but also on the spatial matter distribution of the CSM. By analysing the bolometric light curve of SN 2023ixf beyond 100 d post-explosion, we find that its ejecta, consisting of $9\, \text{M}_{\rm \odot }$ (including $0.07\, \text{M}_{\rm \odot }$ of radioactive $^{56}$Ni) and having a kinetic energy of $1.8\, \text{foe}$, collides with a low-mass CSM of $0.06\, \text{M}_{\rm \odot }$ distributed according to a power-law density profile with an exponent of $s=2.9$. Through these parameters, we estimate that up to $4\pm 1\times 10^{-2}$ muon (anti-)neutrino events could be detected by IceCube within 50 d post-explosion. Although the predicted flux ($\lesssim 3\times 10^{-9}\, \text{GeV} \, \text{cm}^{-2} \, \text{s}^{-1}$) is below current IceCube sensitivity, future telescopes like IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT could detect HE-$\nu$ from similar SN events.