TY - JOUR
T1 - Spallation of r-Process Nuclei Ejected from a Neutron Star Merger
AU - Wang, Xilu
AU - Fields, Brian D.
AU - Mumpower, Matthew
AU - Sprouse, Trevor
AU - Surman, Rebecca
AU - Vassh, Nicole
N1 - Funding Information:
was also supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of Los Alamos National Laboratory under project number 20190021DR.
Funding Information:
We are very grateful to Luke Bovard for providing us trajectories from his neutron star merger simulations. We are pleased to thank George Fuller, Wick Haxton, and Shunsaku Horiuchi for the stimulating conversations. This work was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation under grant number PHY-1630782 Focused Research Hub in Theoretical Physics: Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS) (X.W.), and was also supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Nuclear Theory Contract No. DE-FG02-95-ER40934 (R.S.), DE-AC52-07NA27344 for the topical collaboration Fission In R-process Elements (FIRE; N.V. and R.S.), and the SciDAC collaborations TEAMS DE-SC0018232 (T.S., R.S.). This work benefited from conversations stimulated by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-1430152 (JINA Center for the Evolution of the Elements). M.M. was supported by the US Department of Energy through the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by Triad National Security, LLC, for the National Nuclear Security Administration of U.S. Department of Energy (Contract No. 89233218CNA000001). T.S. was supported in part by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Center for Space and Earth Science, which is funded by its Laboratory Directed Research and Development program under project number 20180475DR. M.M.
Publisher Copyright:
© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.
PY - 2020/10/21
Y1 - 2020/10/21
N2 - Neutron star mergers (NSMs) are rapid neutron capture (r-process) nucleosynthesis sites, which eject materials at high velocities, from 0.1c to as high as 0.6c. Thus the r-process nuclei ejected from a NSM event are sufficiently energetic to initiate spallation reactions with the interstellar medium (ISM) particles. With a thick-Target model for the propagation of high-speed heavy nuclei in the ISM, we find that spallation reactions may shift the r-process abundance patterns towards solar data, particularly around the low-mass edges of the r-process peaks where neighboring nuclei have very different abundances. The spallation effects depend both on the astrophysical conditions of the r-process nuclei and nuclear physics inputs for the nucleosynthesis calculations and the propagation process. This work extends that of [Wang et al.(2019)] by focusing on the influence of nuclear physics variations on spallation effects.
AB - Neutron star mergers (NSMs) are rapid neutron capture (r-process) nucleosynthesis sites, which eject materials at high velocities, from 0.1c to as high as 0.6c. Thus the r-process nuclei ejected from a NSM event are sufficiently energetic to initiate spallation reactions with the interstellar medium (ISM) particles. With a thick-Target model for the propagation of high-speed heavy nuclei in the ISM, we find that spallation reactions may shift the r-process abundance patterns towards solar data, particularly around the low-mass edges of the r-process peaks where neighboring nuclei have very different abundances. The spallation effects depend both on the astrophysical conditions of the r-process nuclei and nuclear physics inputs for the nucleosynthesis calculations and the propagation process. This work extends that of [Wang et al.(2019)] by focusing on the influence of nuclear physics variations on spallation effects.
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U2 - 10.1088/1742-6596/1668/1/012049
DO - 10.1088/1742-6596/1668/1/012049
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85096357881
SN - 1742-6588
VL - 1668
JO - Journal of Physics: Conference Series
JF - Journal of Physics: Conference Series
IS - 1
M1 - 012049
T2 - 9th Nuclear Physics in Astrophysics, NPA 2019
Y2 - 15 September 2019 through 20 September 2019
ER -