Nuclear Effective Masses in Hot, Dense Nuclear Matter from Chiral Effective Field Theory

During core-collapse supernovae (Type II), a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses under gravity, reaching nuclear matter densities and temperatures over 10 million times that of the sun. This collapse halts when the nuclear force stiffens the dense core, launching a shockwave. However, supernova simulations show this shock stalls as it loses energy to dissociating infalling nuclei. The leading mechanism for re-energizing the shock is heating by thermal neutrinos emitted from the dense proto-neutron star at the core of the collapse, undergoing electron capture processes. The thermal neutrinos re-energize the shock and launch a neutrino-driven wind of neutron-rich matter, creating heavy elements via r-process nucleosynthesis. Both the explosion dynamics and nucleosynthesis are highly sensitive to neutrino-nucleon interactions, which depend on in-medium properties of nucleons. In this talk, we present calculations of nucleon effective masses and related properties in hot, dense matter using Many-Body Perturbation Theory (MBPT) with interactions from Chiral Effective Field Theory, the low-energy realization of the strong nuclear force. These results will provide improved input for supernova simulations and neutrino spectra predictions.