Improved nuclear physics for supernovae: Implications for neutrino spectra, nucleosynthesis and dark matter

Properties of hot and dense matter and neutrino interactions play a role in supernovae and a quantitative description is needed to address questions relating to nucleosynthesis of heavy elements, for predicting neutrino and gravitational wave signals and explore the possible role of dark matter. In the first part my talk I will describe efforts to improve the equation of state and neutrino interactions of hot and dense matter using developments in low energy nuclear theory (effective field theories and non-perturbative many body calculations) and discuss its implications for neutrino spectra and nucleosynthesis. In the second part, I will describe my calculation of the production rate of light dark gauge bosons in the supernova from nucleon-nucleon bremsstrahlung reactions and discuss constraints on their properties imposed by SN1987a.