Almost all of the elements heavier than hydrogen that are present in our
solar system were produced by nuclear burning processes either in the early
universe or at some point in the life cycle of stars. In all of these
environments, there are dozens to thousands of nuclear species that interact
with each other to produce successively heavier elements. In this paper, we
present SkyNet, a new general-purpose nuclear reaction network that evolves the
abundances of nuclear species under the influence of nuclear reactions. SkyNet
can be used to compute the nucleosynthesis evolution in all astrophysical
scenarios where nucleosynthesis occurs. SkyNet is free and open-source and aims
to be easy to use and flexible. Any list of isotopes can be evolved and SkyNet
supports various different types of nuclear reactions. SkyNet is modular so
that new or existing physics, like nuclear reactions or equations of state, can
easily be added or modified. Here, we present in detail the physics implemented
in SkyNet with a focus on a self-consistent transition to and from nuclear
statistical equilibrium (NSE) to non-equilibrium nuclear burning, our
implementation of electron screening, and coupling of the network to an
equation of state. We also present comprehensive code tests and comparisons
with existing nuclear reaction networks. We find that SkyNet agrees with
published results and other codes to an accuracy of a few percent.
Discrepancies, where they exist, can be traced to differences in the physics
implementations.Comment: 39 pages, 11 figures, published in ApJ Supplement Serie
