774 research outputs found
A Characterization of the Brightness Oscillations During Thermonuclear Bursts From 4U 1636-536
The discovery of nearly coherent brightness oscillations during thermonuclear
X-ray bursts from six neutron-star low-mass X-ray binaries has opened up a new
way to study the propagation of thermonuclear burning, and may ultimately lead
to greater understanding of thermonuclear propagation in other astrophysical
contexts, such as in Type Ia supernovae. Here we report detailed analyses of
the ~580 Hz brightness oscillations during bursts from 4U 1636-536. We
investigate the bursts as a whole and, in more detail, the initial portions of
the bursts. We analyze the ~580 Hz oscillations in the initial 0.75 seconds of
the five bursts that were used in a previous search for a brightness
oscillation at the expected ~290 Hz spin frequency, and find that if the same
frequency model describes all five bursts there is insufficient data to require
more than a constant frequency or, possibly, a frequency plus a frequency
derivative. Therefore, although it is appropriate to use an arbitrarily
complicated model of the ~580 Hz oscillations to generate a candidate waveform
for the ~290 Hz oscillations, models with more than two parameters are not
required by the data. For the bursts as a whole we show that the
characteristics of the brightness oscillations vary greatly from burst to
burst. We find, however, that in at least one of the bursts, and possibly in
three of the four that have strong brightness oscillations throughout the
burst, the oscillation frequency reaches a maximum several seconds into the
burst and then decreases. This behavior has not been reported previously for
burst brightness oscillations, and it poses a challenge to the standard burning
layer expansion explanation for the frequency changes.Comment: 18 pages including three figures, uses aaspp4.sty, submitted to The
Astrophysical Journal on April
Surface detonation in type Ia supernova explosions?
We explore the evolution of thermonuclear supernova explosions when the
progenitor white dwarf star ignites asymmetrically off-center. Several
numerical simulations are carried out in two and three dimensions to test the
consequences of different initial flame configurations such as spherical
bubbles displaced from the center, more complex deformed configurations, and
teardrop-shaped ignitions. The burning bubbles float towards the surface while
releasing energy due to the nuclear reactions. If the energy release is too
small to gravitationally unbind the star, the ash sweeps around it, once the
burning bubble approaches the surface. Collisions in the fuel on the opposite
side increase its temperature and density and may -- in some cases -- initiate
a detonation wave which will then propagate inward burning the core of the star
and leading to a strong explosion. However, for initial setups in two
dimensions that seem realistic from pre-ignition evolution, as well as for all
three-dimensional simulations the collimation of the surface material is found
to be too weak to trigger a detonation.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, in: Proceedings of the SciDAC 2006 Meeting,
Denver June 25-26 2006, also available at
http://herald.iop.org/jpcs46/m51/gbr//link/40
Conservative Initial Mapping For Multidimensional Simulations of Stellar Explosions
Mapping one-dimensional stellar profiles onto multidimensional grids as
initial conditions for hydrodynamics calculations can lead to numerical
artifacts, one of the most severe of which is the violation of conservation
laws for physical quantities such as energy and mass. Here we introduce a
numerical scheme for mapping one-dimensional spherically-symmetric data onto
multidimensional meshes so that these physical quantities are conserved. We
validate our scheme by porting a realistic 1D Lagrangian stellar profile to the
new multidimensional Eulerian hydro code CASTRO. Our results show that all
important features in the profiles are reproduced on the new grid and that
conservation laws are enforced at all resolutions after mapping.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, Proceeding for Conference on Computational
Physics (CCP 2011
Optimisation of patch distribution strategies for AMR applications
As core counts increase in the world's most powerful supercomputers, applications are becoming limited not only by computational power, but also by data availability. In the race to exascale, efficient and effective communication policies are key to achieving optimal application performance. Applications using adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) trade off communication for computational load balancing, to enable the focused computation of specific areas of interest. This class of application is particularly susceptible to the communication performance of the underlying architectures, and are inherently difficult to scale efficiently. In this paper we present a study of the effect of patch distribution strategies on the scalability of an AMR code. We demonstrate the significance of patch placement on communication overheads, and by balancing the computation and communication costs of patches, we develop a scheme to optimise performance of a specific, industry-strength, benchmark application
Simulations of Astrophysical Fluid Instabilities
We present direct numerical simulations of mixing at Rayleigh-Taylor unstable
interfaces performed with the FLASH code, developed at the ASCI/Alliances
Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago. We
present initial results of single-mode studies in two and three dimensions. Our
results indicate that three-dimensional instabilities grow significantly faster
than two-dimensional instabilities and that grid resolution can have a
significant effect on instability growth rates. We also find that unphysical
diffusive mixing occurs at the fluid interface, particularly in poorly resolved
simulations.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure. To appear in the proceedings of the 20th Texas
Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysic
AZEuS: An Adaptive Zone Eulerian Scheme for Computational MHD
A new adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) version of the ZEUS-3D astrophysical
magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) fluid code, AZEuS, is described. The AMR module in
AZEuS has been completely adapted to the staggered mesh that characterises the
ZEUS family of codes, on which scalar quantities are zone-centred and vector
components are face-centred. In addition, for applications using static grids,
it is necessary to use higher-order interpolations for prolongation to minimise
the errors caused by waves crossing from a grid of one resolution to another.
Finally, solutions to test problems in 1-, 2-, and 3-dimensions in both
Cartesian and spherical coordinates are presented.Comment: 52 pages, 17 figures; Accepted for publication in ApJ
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