The Hamburg/ESO R-process Enhanced Star survey (HERES) IX. Constraining pure r-process Ba/Eu abundance ratio from observations of r-II stars

The oldest stars born before the onset of the main s-process are expected to reveal a pure r-process Ba/Eu abundance ratio. We revised barium and europium abundances of selected very metal-poor (VMP) and strongly r-process enhanced (r-II) stars to evaluate an empirical r-process Ba/Eu ratio. Our calculations were based on non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) line formation for Ba II and Eu II in the classical 1D MARCS model atmospheres. Homogeneous stellar abundances were determined from the Ba II subordinate and resonance lines by applying a common Ba isotope mixture. We used high-quality VLT/UVES spectra and observational material from the literature. For most investigated stars, NLTE leads to a lower Ba, but a higher Eu abundance. The resulting elemental ratio of the NLTE abundances amounts, on average, log(Ba/Eu) = 0.78+-0.06. This is a new constraint to pure r-process production of Ba and Eu. The obtained Ba/Eu abundance ratio of the r-II stars supports the corresponding Solar System r-process ratio as predicted by recent Galactic chemical evolution calculations of Bisterzo, Travaglio, Gallino, Wiescher, and Kappeler. We present the NLTE abundance corrections for lines of Ba II and Eu II in the grid of VMP model atmospheres.Comment: 12 pages, 8 tables, accepted for publication in A&

Finding the Most Metal-poor Stars of the Galactic Halo with the Hamburg/ESO Objective-Prism Survey

I review the status of the search for extremely metal-poor halo stars with the Hamburg/ESO objective-prism survey (HES). 2194 candidate metal-poor turn-off stars and 6133 giants in the magnitude range 14 < B < 17.5 have been selected from 329 (out of 380) HES fields, covering an effective area of 6400 square degrees in the southern extragalactic sky. Moderate-resolution follow-up observations for 3200 candidates have been obtained so far, and ~200 new stars with [Fe/H] <- 3.0 have been found, which trebles the total number of such extremely low-metallicity stars identified by all previous surveys. We use VLT-UT2/UVES, Keck/HIRES, Subaru/HDS, TNG/SARG, and Magellan/MIKE for high-resolution spectroscopy of HES metal-poor stars. I provide an overview of the scientific aims of these programs, and highlight several recent results.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Numerical Study of the Two-Species Vlasov-Amp\`{e}re System: Energy-Conserving Schemes and the Current-Driven Ion-Acoustic Instability

In this paper, we propose energy-conserving Eulerian solvers for the two-species Vlasov-Amp\`{e}re (VA) system and apply the methods to simulate current-driven ion-acoustic instability. The algorithm is generalized from our previous work for the single-species VA system and Vlasov-Maxwell (VM) system. The main feature of the schemes is their ability to preserve the total particle number and total energy on the fully discrete level regardless of mesh size. Those are desired properties of numerical schemes especially for long time simulations with under-resolved mesh. The conservation is realized by explicit and implicit energy-conserving temporal discretizations, and the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) spatial discretizations. We benchmarked our algorithms on a test example to check the one-species limit, and the current-driven ion-acoustic instability. To simulate the current-driven ion-acoustic instability, a slight modification for the implicit method is necessary to fully decouple the split equations. This is achieved by a Gauss-Seidel type iteration technique. Numerical results verified the conservation and performance of our methods

High order operator splitting methods based on an integral deferred correction framework

Integral deferred correction (IDC) methods have been shown to be an efficient way to achieve arbitrary high order accuracy and possess good stability properties. In this paper, we construct high order operator splitting schemes using the IDC procedure to solve initial value problems (IVPs). We present analysis to show that the IDC methods can correct for both the splitting and numerical errors, lifting the order of accuracy by $r$ with each correction, where $r$ is the order of accuracy of the method used to solve the correction equation. We further apply this framework to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Numerical examples in two dimensions of linear and nonlinear initial-boundary value problems are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed IDC approach.Comment: 33 pages, 22 figure