Microscopic Properties of Hot, Dense Nuclear Matter from Chiral EFT for Core-Collapse Supernovae

During core-collapse supernovae, a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses under immense gravitational pressure, reaching nuclear matter densities and temperatures over 10 million times that of the sun. The dense proto-neutron star core undergoes electron capture processes, releasing a large fraction of its energy in the form of thermal neutrinos. The absorption of thermal neutrinos in the outer regions of the neutron star core, known as the neutrino-sphere, play a key role in the dynamics of the supernovae explosion, possible heavy-element nucleosynthesis, and terrestial supernova neutrino detection. Neutrino absorption rates in the neutrino-sphere are highly sensitive to microscopic properties of nuclear matter, particularly nucleon effective masses and proton-neutron energy shifts. In this talk, we present novel ab initio calculations of nucleon effective masses and energy shifts in hot, dense nuclear matter calculated using Many-Body Perturbation Theory (MBPT) with nuclear interactions from Chiral Effective Field Theory (Chiral EFT). These results improve calculations of neutrino opacities in the supernova neutrino-sphere and can also be used as input for supernova simulations.