Powerful gravitational-wave bursts from supernova neutrino oscillations

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During supernova core collapse and bounce resonant active-to-active, as well as active-to-sterile, neutrino (ν) oscillations can take place. Over this phase weak magnetism increases antineutrino mean free paths, and thus its luminosity. Because oscillations feed mass-energy into the target ν species, the large mass-squared difference between ν states implies a huge amount of power to be given off as gravitational waves (GWs) due to the universal spin-rotation and the spin-magnetic coupling driven ν anisotropic flow, which is coherent over the oscillation length. The spacetime strain produced is about two orders of magnitude larger than those from ν difussion or neutron star matter anisotropies. GWs observatories as LIGO, VIRGO, GEO-600, TAMA-300, etc., can search for these bursts far out to the VIRGO cluster of galaxies.