Revisiting neutrino-driven magnetogenesis during stellar core collapse

The literature has not converged onto a precise depiction of the magnetogenesis process for pulsars, and it is profitable to preliminarily but exhaustively assess the viability of the plethora of alternative proposals, before substantial efforts are invested into simulating them in detail. In this note, we tackle one of them, taking notice of an earlier work that suggests neutrino ponderomotive force could spawn a magnetic field not so far off from pulsar strengths. We reexamine this mechanism with more modern technology, accounting for actual core collapse dynamics, and show that this mechanism is likely less powerful than originally envisioned.

💡 Research Summary

The paper revisits the hypothesis that a neutrino‑driven ponderomotive force during core‑collapse supernovae (CCSNe) could generate magnetic fields of order 10⁸–10⁹ G, i.e., comparable to the fields observed in ordinary pulsars. The authors begin by summarizing the long‑standing puzzle of pulsar magnetogenesis: while frozen‑in fields from the progenitor star could in principle survive collapse, they are likely to be disrupted by the violent dynamics of the collapse and by neutrino‑induced transport, and dynamo processes have become the dominant paradigm. An earlier proposal (ref.