33 research outputs found
Efficient approximations of neutrino physics for three-dimensional simulations of stellar core collapse
Neutrino transport in spherically symmetric models of stellar core collapse
and bounce has achieved a technically complete level, rewarded by the agreement
among independent groups that a multi-dimensional treatment of the
fluid-instabilities in the post-bounce phase is indispensable to model
supernova explosions. While much effort is required to develop a reliable
neutrino transport technique in axisymmetry, we explore neutrino physics
approximations and parameterizations for an efficient three-dimensional
simulation of the fluid-instabilities in the shock-heated matter that
accumulates between the accretion shock and the protoneutron star. We
demonstrate the reliability of a simple parameterization scheme in the collapse
phase and extend our 3D magneto-hydrodynamical collapse simulations to a
preliminary postbounce evolution. The growth of magnetic fields is
investigated.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, in Proceedings of "Nuclei in the Cosmos IX,
Geneva, Jun 25-30", associated movies are displayed at
http://www.physik.unibas.ch/~liebend/displa
Linear growth of spiral SASI modes in core-collapse supernovae
Two-dimensional axisymmetric simulations have shown that the post-bounce
accretion shock in core collapse supernovae is subject to the Spherical
Accretion Shock Instability, or SASI. Recent three-dimensional simulations have
revealed the existence of a non-axisymmetric mode of the SASI as well, where
the postshock flow displays a spiral pattern. Here we investigate the growth of
these spiral modes using two-dimensional simulations of the post-bounce
accretion flow in the equatorial plane of a core-collapse supernova. By
perturbing a steady-state model we are able to excite both one, two and
three-armed spiral modes that grow exponentially with time, demonstrating that
these are linearly unstable modes closely related to the original axisymmetric
sloshing modes. By tracking the distribution of angular momentum, we show that
these modes are able to efficiently separate the angular momentum of the
accretion flow (which maintains a net angular momentum of zero), leading to a
significant spin-up of the underlying accreting proto-neutron star.Comment: To be published in The Astrophysical Journa
FISH: A 3D parallel MHD code for astrophysical applications
FISH is a fast and simple ideal magneto-hydrodynamics code that scales to ~10
000 processes for a Cartesian computational domain of ~1000^3 cells. The
simplicity of FISH has been achieved by the rigorous application of the
operator splitting technique, while second order accuracy is maintained by the
symmetric ordering of the operators. Between directional sweeps, the
three-dimensional data is rotated in memory so that the sweep is always
performed in a cache-efficient way along the direction of contiguous memory.
Hence, the code only requires a one-dimensional description of the conservation
equations to be solved. This approach also enable an elegant novel
parallelisation of the code that is based on persistent communications with MPI
for cubic domain decomposition on machines with distributed memory. This scheme
is then combined with an additional OpenMP parallelisation of different sweeps
that can take advantage of clusters of shared memory. We document the detailed
implementation of a second order TVD advection scheme based on flux
reconstruction. The magnetic fields are evolved by a constrained transport
scheme. We show that the subtraction of a simple estimate of the hydrostatic
gradient from the total gradients can significantly reduce the dissipation of
the advection scheme in simulations of gravitationally bound hydrostatic
objects. Through its simplicity and efficiency, FISH is as well-suited for
hydrodynamics classes as for large-scale astrophysical simulations on
high-performance computer clusters. In preparation for the release of a public
version, we demonstrate the performance of FISH in a suite of astrophysically
orientated test cases.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figure
Pushing 1D CCSNe to explosions: model and SN 1987A
We report on a method, PUSH, for triggering core-collapse supernova
explosions of massive stars in spherical symmetry. We explore basic explosion
properties and calibrate PUSH such that the observables of SN1987A are
reproduced. Our simulations are based on the general relativistic hydrodynamics
code AGILE combined with the detailed neutrino transport scheme IDSA for
electron neutrinos and ALS for the muon and tau neutrinos. To trigger
explosions in the otherwise non-exploding simulations, we rely on the
neutrino-driven mechanism. The PUSH method locally increases the energy
deposition in the gain region through energy deposition by the heavy neutrino
flavors. Our setup allows us to model the explosion for several seconds after
core bounce. We explore the progenitor range 18-21M. Our studies
reveal a distinction between high compactness (HC) and low compactness (LC)
progenitor models, where LC models tend to explore earlier, with a lower
explosion energy, and with a lower remnant mass. HC models are needed to obtain
explosion energies around 1 Bethe, as observed for SN1987A. However, all the
models with sufficiently high explosion energy overproduce Ni. We
conclude that fallback is needed to reproduce the observed nucleosynthesis
yields. The nucleosynthesis yields of Ni depend sensitively on the
electron fraction and on the location of the mass cut with respect to the
initial shell structure of the progenitor star. We identify a progenitor and a
suitable set of PUSH parameters that fit the explosion properties of SN1987A
when assuming 0.1M of fallback. We predict a neutron star with a
gravitational mass of 1.50M. We find correlations between explosion
properties and the compactness of the progenitor model in the explored
progenitors. However, a more complete analysis will require the exploration of
a larger set of progenitors with PUSH.Comment: revised version as accepted by ApJ (results unchanged, text modified
for clarification, a few references added); 26 pages, 20 figure
Gravitational waves from supernova matter
We have performed a set of 11 three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical core
collapse supernova simulations in order to investigate the dependencies of the
gravitational wave signal on the progenitor's initial conditions. We study the
effects of the initial central angular velocity and different variants of
neutrino transport. Our models are started up from a 15 solar mass progenitor
and incorporate an effective general relativistic gravitational potential and a
finite temperature nuclear equation of state. Furthermore, the electron flavour
neutrino transport is tracked by efficient algorithms for the radiative
transfer of massless fermions. We find that non- and slowly rotating models
show gravitational wave emission due to prompt- and lepton driven convection
that reveals details about the hydrodynamical state of the fluid inside the
protoneutron stars. Furthermore we show that protoneutron stars can become
dynamically unstable to rotational instabilities at T/|W| values as low as ~2 %
at core bounce. We point out that the inclusion of deleptonization during the
postbounce phase is very important for the quantitative GW prediction, as it
enhances the absolute values of the gravitational wave trains up to a factor of
ten with respect to a lepton-conserving treatment.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, accepted, to be published in a Classical and
Quantum Gravity special issue for MICRA200