There is great current interest in the physics of neutrinos, especially given the recent results on atmospheric neutrinos that seem to confirm mass and mixing. Important further clues about neutrinos are likely to come from astrophysics, in particular from the next Galactic supernova. Core-collapse supernovae emit of order 10⁵⁸ neutrinos and antineutrinos of all flavors over several seconds, with average energies of 10 to 25 MeV. I will discuss what some present and future neutrino detectors will observe, and what we will learn from those measurements. From the neutral-current events, it will be possible to probe tau neutrino masses a million times smaller than the current limit from accelerator studies. This seems to be the best possibility for direct determination of a mu or tau neutrino mass within the range interesting to cosmology and particle physics. Finally, I will also discuss the problem of locating a supernova by its neutrinos.

back