Alexander Hall-Smith (York)

For a neutron star binary system to merge within a Hubble time the progenitor system must undergo a common envelope phase to form the close binary that will collide [1]. The common envelope phase consists of a compact remnant, in this scenario a neutron star, that is engulfed by the envelope of its companion, during which an accretion disk is believed to form around the neutron star. This disk provides a new location for nucleosynthesis to occur as high temperatures and densities are reached. An initial post processing nucleosynthesis (PPN) investigation has shown that this area might provide rapid proton capture nucleosynthesis that is potentially ejected into the interstellar medium. Alongside this an investigation into the impact that different reaction rate libraries and PPN codes might have on resulting abundances was also undertaken. A comparison between different generations of reaction libraries will also be presented, displaying the impact that outdated rates can have when modelling a complex scenario such as a common envelope system. As well as this, a second comparison between different PPN codes will be presented which have shown differing results for both simple and complex stellar models.