Radiation hydrodynamics modelling of kilonovae with SNEC

We develop a method to compute synthetic kilonova light curves that combine numerical relativity simulations of neutron star mergers and the SNEC radiation-hydrodynamics code. We describe our implementation of initial and boundary conditions, r-process heating, and opacities for kilonova simulations. We validate our approach by carefully checking that energy conservation is satisfied and by comparing the SNEC results with those of two semi-analytic light-curve models. We apply our code to the calculation of colour light curves for three binaries having different mass ratios (equal and unequal mass) and different merger outcome (short-lived and long-lived remnants). We study the sensitivity of our results to hydrodynamic effects, nuclear physics uncertainties in the heating rates, and duration of the merger simulations. We find that hydrodynamics effects are typically negligible and that homologous expansion is a good approximation in most cases. However, pressure forces can amplify the impact of uncertainties in the radioactive heating rates. We also study the impact of shocks possibly launched into the outflows by a relativistic jet. None of our models match AT2017gfo, the kilonova in GW170817. This points to possible deficiencies in our merger simulations and kilonova models that neglect non-LTE effects and possible additional energy injection from the merger remnant and to the need to go beyond the assumption of spherical symmetry adopted in this work.

Automated summary

We developed a method to compute synthetic kilonova light curves by combining numerical relativity simulations and radiation-hydrodynamics code. Our approach was validated and applied to different scenarios, studying the sensitivity of the results to various factors. The study showed that hydrodynamic effects are typically negligible and homologous expansion is a good approximation, but pressure forces can amplify uncertainties in the heating rates.