Constraining the absolute neutrino mass with black hole-forming supernovae and scintillation detectors

The terrestrial detection of a neutrino burst from the next galactic core -collapse supernova (CCSN) will provide profound insight into stellar astrophysics, as well as fundamental neutrino physics. Using time -offlight (ToF) effects, a CCSN signal can be used to constrain the absolute neutrino mass. In this work, we study the case where a black hole forms during core -collapse, abruptly truncating the neutrino signal. This sharp cutoff is a feature that can be leveraged in a ToF study, enabling strict limits to be set on the neutrino mass which are largely model -independent. If supernova neutrinos are detected on Earth in liquid scintillator detectors, the exceptional energy resolution would allow an energy -dependent sampling of the ToF effects at low neutrino energies. One promising experimental program is the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a next -generation liquid scintillator detector currently under construction in China. Using three-dimensional black hole -forming core -collapse supernova simulations, the sensitivity of a JUNO-like detector to the absolute neutrino mass is conservatively estimated to be m 1, < 0.39(-0.01) ( 0.06) (-0.01) eV for a 95% CL bound. A future -generation liquid scintillator observatory like THEIA-100 could even achieve sub -0.2 eV sensitivity.