The Bigger They Come, the Harder They Fall: a tale of entropy, the weak interaction (neutrinos), black holes, and the dark side

Neutrino rest mass and oscillations, dark matter and dark energy and, just possibly, the existence of supermassive black holes early in the history of the universe point to our standard model of particle physics being incomplete. We will discuss how the weak interaction drives stellar evolution and how neutrinos steal entropy from massive stars, turning them into giant refrigerators and thereby setting them up for instability and collapse. But much remains mysterious about neutrinos and, indeed obviously, any new particles or objects associated with dark matter and a dark sector or sectors. We will discuss how this unknown physics might impact the collapse of massive, very massive, and supermassive stars. The possibilities are wild, but the advent of high precision cosmic microwave background experiments like Simons Observatory and multi-messenger astrophysics, especially gravitational wave detection, may provide key insights and constraints.

Speaker: George M. Fuller, UC San Diego