Long gamma-ray burst as a production site of r-process elements

We simulated the r-process nucleosynthesis in and around a high entropy jet from a long gamma-ray burst (GRB). Our simulation is based on the collapsar scenario for long GRBs and on relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations (Harikae et al. 2009, 2010) including ray-tracing neutrino transport, which describe the development of the black hole accretion disk and the heating of the funnel region to produce a relativistic jet. The time evolution of the jet was then extended to later phase via axi-symmetric special relativistic hydrodynamic simulation to follow the temperature, entropy, electron fraction, and density evolution for representative test particles. The evolution of nuclear abundances from nucleons to heavy nuclei for representative test particle trajectories was solved in a large nuclear reaction network including more than 5000 isotopes. We show that a robust r-process successfully occurs within the collapsar jet outflow and that sufficient mass is ejected within the flow to account for the observed r-process abundance distribution along with the large dispersion in r-process elements observed in metal-poor halo stars.