We review some of the uncertainties in calculating nucleosynthetic yields,
focusing on the explosion mechanism. Current yield calculations tend to either
use a piston, energy injection, or enhancement of neutrino opacities to drive
an explosion. We show that the energy injection, or more accurately, an entropy
injection mechanism is best-suited to mimic our current understanding of the
convection-enhanced supernova engine. The enhanced neutrino-opacity technique
is in qualitative disagreement with simulations of core-collapse supernovae and
will likely produce errors in the yields. But piston-driven explosions are the
most discrepant. Piston-driven explosion severely underestimate the amount of
fallback, leading to order-of-magnitude errors in the yields of heavy elements.
To obtain yields accurate to the factor of a few level, we must use entropy or
energy injection and this has become the NuGrid collaboration approach.Comment: To appear in the Conference Proceedings for the "10th Symposium on
Nuclei in the Cosmos (NIC X)", July 27 - August 1 2008, Mackinack Island,
Michigan, US
