Relativistic opacities for astrophysical applications

We report on the use of the Los Alamos suite of relativistic atomic physics codes to generate radiative opacities for the modeling of astrophysically relevant plasmas under local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) conditions. The atomic structure calculations are carried out in fine-structure detail, including full configuration interaction. Three example applications are considered: iron opacities at conditions relevant to the base of the solar convection zone, nickel opacities for the modeling of stellar envelopes, and samarium opacities for the modeling of light curves produced by neutron star mergers. In the first two examples, comparisons are made between opacities that are generated with the fully and semi-relativistic capabilities in the Los Alamos suite of codes. As expected for these highly charged, iron-peak ions, the two methods produce reasonably similar results, providing confidence that the numerical methods have been correctly implemented. However, discrepancies greater than 10% are observed for nickel and investigated in detail. In the final application, the relativistic capability is used in a preliminary investigation of the complicated absorption spectrum associated with cold lanthanide elements. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.