New Nuclear Reaction Flow during r-Process Nucleosynthesis in Supernovae: Critical Role of Light Neutron-Rich Nuclei

Abstract

We study the role of light neutron-rich nuclei during r-process nucleosynthesis in supernovae. Most previous studies of the r-process have concentrated on the reaction flow of heavy unstable nuclei. Although the nuclear reaction network includes a few thousand heavy nuclei, only limited reaction flow through light-mass nuclei near the stability line has been used in those studies. However, in a viable scenario of the r-process in neutrino-driven winds, the initial condition is a high-entropy hot plasma consisting of neutrons, protons, and electron-positron pairs experiencing an intense flux of neutrinos. In such environments light-mass nuclei as well as heavy nuclei are expected to play important roles in the production of seed nuclei and r-process elements. Thus, we have extended our fully implicit nuclear reaction network so that it includes all nuclei up to the neutron drip line for Z $ \leq 10$, in addition to a larger network for Z $ \geq 10$. In the present nucleosynthesis study, we utilize a wind model of massive SNeII explosions to study the effects of this extended network. We find that a new nuclear-reaction flow path opens in the very light neutron-rich region. This new nuclear reaction flow can change the final heavy-element abundances by as much as an order of magnitude.