Studies of r-process nucleosynthesis using r-Java, a GUI based software

Abstract

The r-process is a series of nuclear reactions that produce about half of the elements heavier than iron and probably occur during a violent stellar explosion or collision, not regular stellar burning. While the exact astrophysical site of the r-process is still debated in the scientific community, the nuclear physics that make up the r-process are generally known. These nuclear reactions take significant computational resources to calculate in their entirety. r-Java is a computational web-based tool, equipped with a graphical user interface (GUI) designed to calculate abundances produced by the r-process depending on a number of input parameters. In this thesis we will use the latest version of r-Java (v 2.0) to produce abundance curves for a number of initial parameters, as well as vary the initial parameters to obtain a deeper understanding of their influence on the overall production of elements by the r-process. Our main results are the observation of systematic trends between abundance and temperature as well as improved abundance curves obtained through the use of a full network simulation as compared to that of the waiting point approximation (WPA).