Final Products of the rp‐Process on Accreting Neutron Stars
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Abstract
Using both shell-flash and realistic models on accreting neutron stars with the full nuclear reaction network up to Bi, we investigate the detailed relation between the final products of the rp-process and the ignition pressure. We find that nuclear fuels of H and 4 He are almost burned out after the flash and that the mass number of synthesized nuclei reaches to '100 in the pressure range from 10 23 to 10 23.5 dyn cm � 2 for an eutron star of 1.4Mand 10 km radius. Furthermore, p-nuclei up to 126 Xe are found to be produced after the flash, thanks to our large network. The postprocess nucleosynthesis for accretion rates of 3 � 10 � 10 ,3 � 10 � 9 , and 10 � 8 Myr � 1 , which corresponds to an ignition pressure from 10 22:7 to 10 22:9 dyn cm � 2 , reveals that H is exhausted completely during the burst. This is because H decreases significantly as a result of the steady burning before the burst and convective mixing at the initial stage; we find that 64 Zn is the most abundant element after the burst. Subject headings: accretion, accretion disks — nuclear reactions, nucleosynthesis, abundances — stars: neutron — X-rays: bursts