[MODEST] SD/SE interface / Arnett's SE code

[James Lombardi]

Dear All,

Piet and I talked briefly yesterday about the SD/SE interface.  If the SE 
module had a routine that returned an upper limit on the maximum radius 
that a star could ever achieve, then the SD code could make a call to 
EvolveStar only if there is an encounter within that radius.  Such an 
approach would avoid having to make many calls to StarEvolve on a dynamical 
timescale and would also avoid having to compute and tabulate the full 
evolution at the moment a remnant is created.  The maximum radius returned 
could be as simple as a carefully chosen function of the star's 
mass.  Comments on this idea are welcome.

Also, I wanted to plug David Arnett's publicly available SE code, Tycho, 
for those of us who do not already have such a code at our disposal.  My 
group has started playing with it over the last few days: we've found it to 
be user friendly and also full of wonderful features and detailed physics 
that I did not expect!  It even accounts for rotation at some level (I 
haven't looked at this in detail yet).  David, if you are online and able 
to comment... what major challenges, if any, do you foresee if we try to 
use Tycho to evolve a (for now, non-rotating) merger remnant that is 
initially far from thermal equilibrium and that has strange chemical 
composition profiles?

Cheers,
Jamie