Research

I perform 3D hydrodynamical simulations of helium-ignited binary white dwarf mergers using FLASH with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), mapping merger-phase initial conditions from the moving-mesh code AREPO. A custom refinement strategy reduces the computational cost by roughly 4–5×.

The simulations reveal two distinct outcomes: a double detonation (D6) in which the secondary white dwarf survives intact, and a quadruple detonation in which helium and core detonations propagate to the secondary, destroying both white dwarfs — consistent with recent theoretical predictions for the dominant outcome of helium-ignited mergers. I also compute the nucleosynthetic yields for both models.

arXiv:2602.23414

Building on the helium-ignited merger work, this project explores the explosion outcomes of oxygen–neon and carbon–oxygen white dwarf mergers in the double-degenerate channel, investigating the conditions under which these systems produce Type Ia supernovae. A first-authored paper is in preparation.

I developed 2D FLASH models of pure deflagration and delayed-detonation explosions and computed nucleosynthetic yields with the Torch nuclear network.

The work showed that a pure deflagration explosion best reproduces the observed neutron-rich X-ray abundances of 3C 397 measured by Suzaku. The results were published in MNRAS (2024) and presented at AAS 242 and APS New England.

MNRAS 532, 1087–1098 (2024)arXiv:2404.04330