Production of Nickel-56 in black hole-neutron star merger accretion disk outflows

Understand

The likely outcome of a compact object merger event is a central black hole surrounded by a rapidly accreting torus of debris.

• This disk of debris is a rich source of element synthesis, the outcome of which is needed to predict electromagnetic counterparts of individual events and to understand the contribution of mergers to galactic chemical evolution.
• Here we study disk outflow nucleosynthesis in the context of a two-dimensional, time-dependent black hole-neutron star merger accretion disk model.
• We use two time snapshots from this model to examine the impact of the evolution of the neutrino fluxes from the disk on the element synthesis.