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Fission and fusion of heavy nuclei induced by the passage of a radiation-mediated shock in BNS mergers by Granot, Alon; Levinson, Amir; Nakar, Ehud is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Fission and fusion of heavy nuclei induced by the passage of a radiation-mediated shock in BNS mergers about?

We compute the structure of a Newtonian, multi-ion radiation-mediated shock (RMS) for different compositions anticipated in various stellar explosions. We use a multifluid RMS model that incorporates electrostatic coupling between the different plasma constituents as well as Coulomb friction in a self-consistent manner, and approximates the effect of pair creation and the presence of free neutrons in the shock upstream on the shock structure. We find that under certain conditions a significant velocity separation is developed between different ions in the shock downstream and demonstrate that in fast enough shocks ion-ion collisions may trigger fusion and fission events at a relatively high rate. Our analysis ignores anomalous coupling through plasma microturbulence, that might reduce the velocity spread downstream below the activation energy for nuclear reactions. A rough estimate of the scale separation in RMS suggests that for shocks propagating in BNS merger ejecta the anomalous coupling length may exceed the radiation length, allowing a considerable composition change behind the shock via inelastic collisions of $\alpha$ particles with heavy elements at shock velocities $\beta

Author

Granot, Alon; Levinson, Amir; Nakar, Ehud

Published

2023

Language

EN