Speaker
Description
The opacity of plasma is often utilized in astrophysics for studying solar models, (solar) neutrino observations or neutron star mergers. The opacity of an atomic ion hereby quantifies how photons are absorbed or re-scattered by the plasma ions. The opacity of different ion sources also enters explicitly the radiation transport in different environments, such as stellar interiors, fusion devices or short-wavelength plasma light sources, at least, if local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) conditions can be assumed.
To better understand the sensitivity and role of (different) opacities in modelling the light curves from kilonovae, the Jena Atomic Calculator (JAC) has been expanded in order to compute, analyze and discuss different kinds of opacity. JAC [1] is based on Julia, a new programming language for scientific computing, which provides an easy-to-use but powerful platform to extent atomic theory towards new (astrophysical) applications for almost all atoms and ions across the periodic table, including atomic cascade processes of different sort and complexity [2].
[1] S. Fritzsche, Comp. Phys. Commun. 240, 1 (2019); https://github.com/OpenJAC/JAC.jl
[2] S. Fritzsche, P. Palmeri & S. Schippers, Symmetry 13, 520 (2021).
