3D Collapse of Rotating Stellar Iron Cores in General Relativity Including Deleptonization and a Nuclear Equation of State

We present 2D and 3D simulations of the collapse of rotating stellar iron cores in general relativity employing a nuclear equation of state and an approximate treatment of deleptonization. We compare fully general relativistic and conformally flat evolutions and find that the latter treatment is sufficiently accurate for the core-collapse supernova problem. We focus on gravitational wave (GW) emission from rotating collapse, bounce, and early postbounce phases. Our results indicate that the GW signature of these phases is much more generic than previously estimated. We also track the growth of a nonaxisymmetric instability in one model, leading to strong narrow-band GW emission.

Figure 1

GW strain $h_{+}$ along the equator for models s20A2B2 and s20A1B5. We compare 2D-CFC and 3D-full-GR results.

Figure 2

Equatorial GW strain $h_{+}$ for a representative subset of the models listed in Table . Note the generic shape of the core bounce GW signal.

Figure 3

Normalized mode amplitudes $A_m=|C_m|/C_0$ at postbounce times (upper panel) and GW strains $h_{+}$ and $h_{\times }$ along the poles (lower panel) for model E20A.

Figure 4

Spectra of the characteristic GW strain $h_{\mathrm{char}}$ of all models and the LIGO (optimal) rms noise curves [32].