Observational Properties of Wolf-Rayet stars and Type Ib/Ic supernova progenitors

We investigate the observational properties of Wolf-Rayet stars, suggest the constraint of their mass-loss rate and apply our results to the observed progenitor candidates of Type Ib/Ic supernovae (iPTF13bvn and SN 2017ein). For this purpose, we adopt the WR star models with various mass-loss rates and wind terminal velocities. We obtain the high resolution spectra of those models at the pre-supernova phase using the radiative transfer code CMFGEN. We verify the optically faint property of SN Ic progenitors and show that the optical faintness is mainly originated by the high effective temperature at the photosphere. We also show that a simple analytic model for WR winds using a constant opacity can roughly predict the photospheric parameters. We show that the change of the mass-loss rate and the terminal wind velocity critically affects the optical luminosity. We find the optical luminosities of SN Ic progenitor models with our fiducial mass-loss rate prescription are fainter than the detection limits. We also suggest the mass-loss rate of WR stars may not exceed 2 times of our fiducial value by comparing our predictions with the detection limit of SN Ib/Ic progenitors. The directly observed progenitor candidate of iPTF13bvn can be explained by our SN Ib progenitor models. We find that the SN 2017ein progenitor candidate is too bright and too blue to be a SN Ic progenitor.