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

除了氢和氦之外，所有的元素都是在恒星内部通过“核合成”过程产生的。 因此，构成行星和人类的物质的起源与恒星内部发生的详细过程密切相关。 PI和他的合作者将使用新的计算技术和最强大的计算资源来模拟宇宙中最早的恒星内部的条件。 这些模拟将被用来评估一个假设的，但未经探索的，核合成机制，他们称之为“i过程”。 研究生将接受该领域世界领导者之一的尖端恒星建模和计算天体物理学培训。 探索新形式的核合成的潜力是核物理领域以及天体物理学感兴趣的。 在这个项目中开发的先进技术可以应用于计算科学的其他领域。这项研究的目标是模拟宇宙早期存在的那种恒星内部的对流和核合成过程。 他们将开发新的“自动校正”技术，将对流的3-D处理与1-D恒星演化模型相结合，并将生成一个大型的结果数据库和挖掘该数据库的工具。 这些结果将被更大的恒星建模社区所使用，它们将在计算天体物理学中开辟新的领域。 这些模拟应该允许探测假设的核合成过程，这些过程是由中子捕获驱动的，速度介于s和r过程之间。该奖项由物理系计算物理计划和天文科学系恒星天文学和天体物理计划共同支持。

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.