It's my understanding the general mechanism of core collapse involves the adiabatic constant of the material, gamma. This is the exponent in the relation P V^(gamma) = constant.

For a normal, non-relativistic gas in which the particles have no internal degrees of freedom, gamma is 5/3. As a gas becomes more relativistic, and as photon pressure becomes more important, gamma declines toward 4/3.

For gamma = 4/3, a self-gravitating gas will be marginally stable: the energy needed to compress a sphere of the gas will be equal to the gravitational potential energy liberated by the compression. So, any effect that pushes gamma below 4/3 makes it unstable against collapse.

In a conventional core collapse SN this is photodissociation of nuclei, where energy gets soaked up in breaking apart nuclei into alpha particles and then free nucleons. In a pair-instability SN, this is increasing conversion of photons to electron-positron pairs.

My favourite kind of supernova, due to their absurdity.