Spallation of r-Process Nuclei Ejected from a Neutron Star Merger
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.06370,
title = {Spallation of r-Process Nuclei Ejected from a Neutron Star Merger},
author = {Xilu Wang and Brian D. Fields and Matthew Mumpower and Trevor Sprouse and Rebecca Surman and Nicole Vassh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.06370},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
11 pages, 3 figures, NPA-IX proceedings