Though all heavy elements are produced within galaxies, the vast majority of the universe's heavy elements reside outside of galaxies, in the low-density inter- and circumgalactic medium. Yet this diffuse gas is chronically under-resolved in most cosmological simulations to date. In this talk, I will present results from our new suite of FOGGIE simulations wherein we resolve the circumgalactic...
Nucleons in dense nuclear matter appear to have reduced inertial masses due to momentum dependent interactions they experience with other nucleons. This reduction of their masses is often referred to as their effective mass, and at saturation density the masses are reduced to about 70% of their vacuum mass. In asymmetric matter the effective masses of neutrons and protons can be different,...
The astrophysical production site of the heaviest elements in the universe remains a mystery. One way to observationally investigate the production site of heavy elements is by studying metal-poor stars that retain imprints of nucleosynthetic event material in their photospheres. We introduce and apply the "Actinide-Dilution with Matching" model to a variety of $r$-process enhanced stellar...
We present the most extensive set of 3D, microscopic quantum calculations of nuclear pasta to date, under conditions relevant to the crusts of neutron stars, and spanning the uncertainty in nuclear models. We show that quantum shell effects and the small differences in surface energies of different pasta configurations lead to a large number of local minima in their energy surfaces at a given...
In this work, we propose a long-term strategy for detecting neutrinos from the remnant of binary compact-object mergers with a future M-ton water-Cherenkov detector such as Hyper-Kamiokande. Neutrino luminosity and average energy from the merger remnant are extracted from several state-of-the-art binary merger simulations and are applied to our estimation of signal events on a M-ton water...
