Three-Dimensional General-Relativistic Simulations of Neutrino-Driven Winds from Rotating Proto-Neutron Stars

We explore the effects of rapid rotation on the properties of neutrino-heated winds from proto-neutron stars (PNS) formed in core-collapse supernovae or neutron-star mergers by means of 3D GR hydrodynamical simulations with M0 neutrino transport. We focus on conditions characteristic of a few seconds into the PNS cooling evolution over which most of the wind mass-loss will occur. After an initial transient phase, all of our models reach approximately steady-state outflow solutions with positive energies and sonic surfaces captured on the computational grid. Our non-rotating and slower-rotating models generate approximately spherically symmetric outflows with properties in good agreement with previous PNS wind studies. By contrast, our most rapidly spinning PNS solutions generate outflows focused in the rotational equatorial plane with much higher mass-loss rates (by over an order of magnitude), lower velocities, lower entropy, and lower asymptotic electron fractions, than otherwise similar non-rotating wind solutions. Although such rapidly spinning PNS are likely rare in nature, their atypical nucleosynthetic composition and outsized mass yields could render them important contributors of light neutron-rich nuclei compared to more common slowly rotating PNS birth. Our calculations pave the way to including the combined effects of rotation and a dynamically-important large-scale magnetic field on the wind properties within a 3D GRMHD framework.