Modeling Astrophysical Explosions and the Nucleosynthesis of the Heavy Elements
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
The heavier elements in the Universe were created and dispersed in the supernova explosions of stars. These events involve a fascinating interplay of nuclear physics, gravity, hydrodynamics, neutrino and photon transport, and radioactive decay, all occurring under extreme conditions. Astronomical experiments provide a rich and constraining data set, but our theoretical understanding of supernovae remains incomplete. The goal of this project is to advance numerical models of astrophysical explosions and use them to connect the nuclear theory of supernovae to current observational and experimental programs. Our contributions focus on one important aspect of the problem --modeling the transport of radiation (both neutrino and electromagnetic) which is essential to understanding the supernova explosion mechanism, the resulting nucleosynthesis, and the observable spectra and light curves. We will exploit recent advances in high performance computing to improve 3-dimensional simulations of core collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers. The benefits include: 1) Further defining the explosive astrophysical environments that govern the nucleosynthesis of r-process nuclei. 2) Preparing the way for more realistic treatments of neutrino interactions, with the ultimate goal of making supernovae a testing ground for probing fundamental neutrino physics, e.g., unknown mixing angles and new aspects of the MSW mechanism. 3) Providing a means for testing explosion simulations and nucleosynthesis calculations against data from optical and x-ray telescopes, thereby permitting the experimental validation or falsification of supernova models. 4) Helping position nuclear physics, through the development of new algorithms of the type incorporated in our simulation codes, to play a leading role in DOE large scale computing.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0008067
- OSTI ID:
- 1491120
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-UCBERKELEY-08067; 0004
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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