Monte Carlo approaches to radiation transport have several attractive properties such as simplicity of implementation, high accuracy, and good parallel scaling. Moreover, Monte Carlo methods can handle complicated geometries and are relatively easy t
o extend to multiple spatial dimensions, which makes them potentially interesting in modeling complex multi-dimensional astrophysical phenomena such as core-collapse supernovae. The aim of this paper is to explore Monte Carlo methods for modeling neutrino transport in core-collapse supernovae. We generalize the Implicit Monte Carlo photon transport scheme of Fleck & Cummings and gray discrete-diffusion scheme of Densmore et al. to energy-, time-, and velocity-dependent neutrino transport. Using our 1D spherically-symmetric implementation, we show that, similar to the photon transport case, the implicit scheme enables significantly larger timesteps compared with explicit time discretization, without sacrificing accuracy, while the discrete-diffusion method leads to significant speed-ups at high optical depth. Our results suggest that a combination of spectral, velocity-dependent, Implicit Monte Carlo and discrete-diffusion Monte Carlo methods represents a robust approach for use in neutrino transport calculations in core-collapse supernovae. Our velocity-dependent scheme can easily be adapted to photon transport.
We discuss results from simulations of black hole formation in failing core-collapse supernovae performed with the code GR1D, a new open-source Eulerian spherically-symmetric general-relativistic hydrodynamics code. GR1D includes rotation in an appro
ximate way (1.5D), comes with multiple finite-temperature nuclear equations of state (EOS), and treats neutrinos in the post-core-bounce phase via a 3-flavor leakage scheme and a heating prescription. We chose the favored K_0=220 MeV-variant of the Lattimer & Swesty (1990) EOS and present collapse calculations using the progenitor models of Limongi & Chieffi (2006). We show that there is no direct (or ``prompt) black hole formation in the collapse of ordinary massive stars (8 M_Sun ~< M_ZAMS ~< 100 M_Sun) and present first results from black hole formation simulations that include rotation.
