Related papers: A new stellar mixing process operating below shell…
Mixing processes in stars driven by composition gradients as a result of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability are not anticipated. They are supported only by hydrodynamic studies of stellar convection. We find that such mixing occurs below the…
The turbulent burning of nuclei is a common phenomenon in the evolution of stars. Here we examine a challenging case: the merging of the neon and oxygen burning shells in a 23 M$_{\odot}$ star. A previously unknown quasi-steady state is…
A region of a star that is stable to convection according to the Ledoux criterion may nevertheless undergo additional mixing if the mean molecular weight increases with radius. This process is called fingering (thermohaline) convection and…
Shell convection driven by nuclear burning in a stellar core is a common hydrodynamic event in the evolution of many types of stars. We encounter and simulate this convection (i) in the helium core of a low-mass red giant during core helium…
Turbulent mixing remains one of the primary uncertainties in the modeling of stellar interiors. In stellar evolution simulations, regions where mixing occurs are typically identified using instability criteria. A particularly interesting…
We perform the first multidimensional fluid simulations of thermonuclear helium ignition underneath a hydrogen-rich shell. This situation is relevant to Type I X-ray bursts on neutron stars that accrete from a hydrogen-rich companion. Using…
Convective overshoot mixing is a critical ingredient of stellar structure models, but is treated in most cases by ad hoc extensions of the mixing-length theory for convection. Advanced theories which are both more physical and numerically…
Thermohaline convection is a standard chemical mixing process in stellar interiors, yet its mixing efficiency is not fully settled. Competing theories predict turbulent diffusion coefficients, $D_\mu$, that can differ by orders of…
The convective overshoot mixing plays an important role in stellar structure and evolution. However, the overshoot mixing is a long standing problem. The uncertainty of the overshoot mixing is one of the most uncertain factors in stellar…
We have identified an important source of mixing in stellar radiation zones, that would arise whenever two conditions are satisfied: (1) the presence of an inverse vertical compositional gradient, and (2) the presence of…
We have derived a new expression for the thermohaline mixing coefficient in stars, including the effects of radiative levitation and external turbulence, by solving Boussinesq equations in a quasi-incompressible fluid with a linear…
In this work, we investigate the impact of uncertainties due to convective boundary mixing (CBM), commonly called `overshoot', namely the boundary location and the amount of mixing at the convective boundary, on stellar structure and…
The treatment of convection remains a major weakness in the modelling of stellar evolution with one-dimensional (1D) codes. The ever increasing computing power makes now possible to simulate in 3D part of a star for a fraction of its life,…
In spite of the great effort made in the last decades to improve our understanding of stellar evolution, significant uncertainties remain due to our poor knowledge of some complex physical processes that require an empirical calibration,…
Semiconvection - mixing that occurs in regions that are stable when considering compositional gradients, but unstable when ignoring them - is shown to have the greatest potential impact on main sequence stars with masses in the range 1.2 -…
Much progress has recently been made in understanding and quantifying vertical mixing induced by double-diffusive instabilities such as fingering convection (usually called thermohaline convection) and oscillatory double-diffusive…
Hydrogen and/or helium accreted by a neutron star from a binary companion may undergo thermonuclear fusion. At different mass accretion rates different burning regimes are discerned. Theoretical models predict helium fusion to proceed as a…
The evolution of the first generations of stars at zero or extremly low metallicity, and especially some crucial properties like the primary N14 production, is charactarized by convective-reactive mixing events that are mostly absent from…
We present extensive sets of stellar models for 0.8-9.0Msun in mass and -5 <= [Fe/H] <= -2 and Z = 0 in metallicity. The present work focuses on the evolutionary characteristics of hydrogen mixing into the He-flash convective zones during…
Fingering convection (or thermohaline convection) is a weak yet important kind of mixing that occurs in stably-stratified stellar radiation zones in the presence of an inverse mean-molecular-weight gradient. Brown et al. (2013) recently…