  We investigate the possibility of a supernova in supermassive ($5 \times 10^4
\;M_\odot$) population III stars induced by a general relativistic instability
occurring in the helium burning phase. This explosion could occur via rapid
helium burning during an early contraction of the isentropic core. Such an
explosion would be visible to future telescopes and could disrupt the proposed
direct collapse formation channel for early universe supermassive black holes.
We simulate first the stellar evolution from hydrogen burning using a 1D
stellar evolution code with a post Newtonian approximation; at the point of
dynamical collapse, we switch to a 1D (general relativistic) hydrodynamics code
with the Misner-Sharpe metric. In opposition to a previous study, we do not
find an explosion in the non rotating case, although our model is close to
exploding for a similar mass to the explosion in the previous study. When we
include slow rotation, we find one exploding model, and we conclude that there
likely exist additional exploding models, though they may be rare.
