Extended calculations of energy levels and transition rates of Nd II-IV ions for application to neutron star mergers

Understand

Coalescence of binary neutron star give rise to electromagnetic emission, kilonova, powered by radioactive decays of r-process nuclei.

• Observations of kilonova associated with GW170817 provided unique opportunity to study the heavy element synthesis in the Universe.
• However, atomic data of r-process elements to decipher the light curves and spectral features of kilonova are not fully constructed yet.
• In this paper, we perform extended atomic calculations of neodymium (Nd, Z=60) to study the impact of accuracies in atomic calculations to the astrophysical opacities.