r-Process Lanthanide Production and Heating Rates in Kilonovae

Abstract

r-Process nucleosynthesis in material ejected during neutron star mergers may lead to radioactively powered transients called kilonovae. The timescale and peak luminosity of these transients depend on the composition of the material after nuclear burning ceases, which determines the local heating rate from nuclear decays and the opacity. Kasen et al. (2013, ApJ, 774, 25) and Tanaka & Hotokezaka (2013, ApJ, 775, 113) pointed out that lanthanides can drastically increase the opacity in these outflows. We use the new general-purpose nuclear reaction network SkyNet to carry out a parameter study of r-process nucleosynthesis for a range of initial electron fractions Y_e, initial specific entropies s, and expansion timescales τ. We find that the ejecta is lanthanide-free for Y_e ≳ 0.22−0.30, depending on s and τ. The heating rate is insensitive to s and τ, but certain, larger values of Ye lead to reduced heating rates, due to individual nuclides dominating the heating. With a simplified gray radiative transport scheme in spherical symmetry, we estimate the luminosity, time, and effective temperature at the peak of the light curves. We find that the luminosity peaks much earlier, at about a day in the lanthanide-free cases compared to a week in the lanthanide-rich cases. The heating rate does not change much as the ejecta becomes lanthanide-free with increasing Y_e, but the light curve peak becomes about an order of magnitude brighter because it peaks much earlier when the heating rate is larger. We also provide parametric fits for the heating rates between 0.1 and 100 days, and we provide a simple fit in Y_e, s, and τ to estimate whether the ejecta is lanthanide-rich or not.