On The Feasibility Of Using Neutrino Intensity Interferometry To Measure Proto-Neutron Star Radii

Abstract

It has recently been demonstrated analytically that the two-point correlation function for pairs of neutrinos may contain information about the size of the proto-neutron star formed in a Galactic core-collapse supernova. The information about the size of the source emerges via the neutrino equivalent of intensity interferometry originally used by Hanbury-Brown and Twiss with photons to measure the radii of stars. However the analytic demonstration of neutrino intensity interferometry with supernova neutrinos made a number of approximations: that the two neutrinos had equal energies, the neutrinos were emitted at simultaneous times from two points and were detected simultaneously at two detection points that formed a plane with the emission points. These approximations need to be relaxed in order to better determine the feasibility of neutrino intensity interferometry for supernovae neutrinos in a more realistic scenario. In this paper we further investigate the feasibility of intensity interferometry for supernova neutrinos by relaxing all the approximations made in the earlier study. We find that, while relaxing any one assumption reduces the correlation signal, the relaxation of the assumption of equal times of detection is by far the largest detrimental factor. For neutrino energies of order $\sim$15 MeV and a supernova distance of L = 10 kpc, we show that in order to observe the interference pattern in the two-point correlation function of the neutrino pairs, the timing resolution of a detector needs to be on the order of $\lesssim 10^{-21}\;{\rm s}$ if the initial neutrino wave packet has a size of $\sigma_x \sim 10^{-11}\;{\rm cm}$.