MESAHub / MESAHub/mesa

Revisit screening prescriptions to include electron-ion polarization effects

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Description

While working on "screening" (electron-ion polarization effects) in the EOS, A. Y. Potekhin made the following comments on the nuclear reactions screening in MESA:

the prescriptions by Chugunov et al. (2007) for screening of nuclear reactions ignore the electron-ion polarization and therefore are not very accurate. For the classical nuclei, the old prescription by Salpeter & van Horn (1969) is even better. A more accurate prescription, which takes into account the polarization and also matches the Chugunov et al.'s results for strong quantum limit, is that of our paper with Gilles Chabrier, A&A 538, A115 (2012).

This might be useful info in future work on screening, so noting it here.

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
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Research direction

Start by locating the EOS screening implementation and identifying where the Chugunov et al. (2007) nuclear-reaction prescription is applied. Read the cited Potekhin and Chabrier A&A 538, A115 (2012) paper and compare its electron-ion polarization treatment with the current behavior; done means an agreed, validated replacement prescription is implemented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
fortran
Domain
hpc
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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