CDS&E: 3-D Simulations of i-Process Nucleosynthesis in the Early Universe

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All of the elements other than hydrogen and helium are created inside of stars by "nucleosynthesis" processes. The origin of the material that makes planets - and people - is thus intimately tied to the detailed process that take place within stars. The PI and his collaborators will use novel computational techniques and the most powerful computing resources available to simulate conditions inside the earliest stars in the universe. These simulations will be used to evaluate a postulated, but unexplored, nucleosynthesis mechanism they call the "i-process". Graduate students will be trained in cutting-edge stellar modeling and computational astrophysics by one of the world leaders in this field. The potential for probing new forms of nucleosynthesis are of interest to the nuclear physics field as well as to astrophysics. Advanced techniques developed in this program could have applications in other areas of computational science.The goal of this investigation is to simulate convection and nucleosynthesis processes inside the kind of stars that were present early in the universe. They will develop novel "autocorrecting" techniques to couple a 3-D treatment of convection with 1-D stellar evolution models, and they will generate a large database of results and tools to mine this database. These results will be accessible to the larger stellar modeling community, and they will chart new territory in computational astrophysics. These simulations should allow a probe of postulated nucleosynthesis processes that are driven by neutron capture at rates intermediate between the s- and r-processes.This award is supported jointly by the Computational Physics Program in the Division of Physics and the Stellar Astronomy and Astrophysics Program in the Division of Astronomical Sciences.