Enhanced high-energy neutrino emission from choked gamma-ray bursts due to meson and muon acceleration

It has been suggested that a potentially large fraction of supernovae could be accompanied by relativistic outflows that stall below the stellar surface. In this letter we point out that internal shocks that are believed to accelerate protons to very high energies in these flows will also accelerate secondary mesons and muons. As a result the neutrino spectrum from meson and muon decay is expected to be much harder compared to previous estimates, extending as a single power law up to ~10^3 TeV. This greatly improves the detection prospects.