Post-shock-revival evolutions in the neutrino-heating mechanism of core-collapse supernovae

We perform some experimental simulations in spherical symmetry and axisymmetry to understand the post-shock-revival evolution of core-collapse supernovae. Assuming that the stalled shock wave is relaunched by neutrino heating and employing the so-called light bulb approximation, we induce shock revival by raising the neutrino luminosity by hand up to the critical value, which is also de- termined by dynamical simulations. A 15M_{sun} progenitor model is employed. We incorporate nuclear network calculations with a consistent equation of state in the simulations to account for the energy release by nuclear reactions and their feedback to hydrodynamics. Varying the shock-relaunch time rather arbitrarily, we investigate the ensuing long-term evolutions systematically, paying particular attention to the explosion energy and nucleosynthetic yields as a function of this relaunch time, or equivalently the accretion rate at shock revival. We study in detail how the diagnostic explosion energy approaches the asymptotic value and which physical processes contribute to the explosion energy in what proportions as well as their dependence on the relaunch time and the dimension of dynamics. We find that the contribution of nuclear reactions to the explosion energy is comparable to or greater than that of neutrino heating. In particular, recombinations are dominant over burnings in the contributions of nuclear reactions. Interestingly 1D models studied in this paper cannot produce the appropriate explosion energy and nickel mass simultaneously, overproducing nickels, whereas this problem is resolved in 2D models if the shock is relaunched at 300-400ms after bounce.
Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ. A major bug fixed in the 2D simulations. The main conclusion unchanged qualitatively