Progenitor dependence in Core-Collapse Supernova Simulations

Roland Haas, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Erik Schnetter, Christian Ott, Roland Haas, Philipp Moesta, Luke Roberts, Eliu Huerta Escudero, Daniel Johnson, Andre da Silva Schneider, Eric West

Core-Collapse Supernova (CCSN) explosions are cosmic engines that enrich the interstellar medium with the ashes of thermonuclear fusion inside massive stars. Their shock waves can shut off and trigger star formation and regulate the gas budget of galaxies. They are the birth places of neutron stars and stellar mass black holes. CCSNe pose a tremendous computational challenge: they are a true full 3D, multi-scale, multi-physics petascale problem. We propose to leverage the tremendous compute power of Blue Waters to carry out 3D general-relativistic neutrino radiation-hydrodynamics simulations of CCSNe. We request a total of 1 million Blue Waters node hours and 210 TB of long-term storage for long-term 3D CCSN simulations, comparing the explosion physics and dynamics in two different massive stars of 12 and 27 solar masses. Understanding the explosion physics and the dependence on the structure and mass of the progenitor star is essential for providing solid predictions for the mapping of initial progenitor star mass to outcome, parameters, and multi-messenger signature (neutrinos, gravitational waves, photons) of the explosion. The two new simulations we propose will be crucial additions to our simulation catalog, that thus far includes CCSN simulations of 15, 20, and 40 solar mass stars.