The Explosive Burning of Oxygen and Silicon

This paper analyzes the explosive burning of oxygen and silicon. Major emphasis is on nuclear details of how the fuel burns and of the nucleosynthesis that results from the burning. By characterizing the explosions in terms of an e-folding time for the reduction of the density we are able to map the nature of the nucleosynthesis in terms of that time scale and the initial temperature, density, and chemical composition. These results make it possible in the future to infer rather well the results of explosive burning without carrying out the laborious integrations of the differential equations for the abundances, as we have done in this paper. The major and minor sections of the paper are as follows: