Explodability matters: How neutrino-driven explosions change explosive nucleosynthesis yields

¹ Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
² Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, Via Santa Sofia 62, Catania I-95123, Italy

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Received: 16 October 2025
Accepted: 28 March 2026

Abstract

Explosive nucleosynthesis is affected by many uncertainties, particularly regarding the assumptions and prescriptions adopted during a star’s evolution. Moreover, simple explosion models are often used, which can introduce large errors in the assumed explosion energy and mass cut. In this paper, our goal is to analyze the explosion properties and nucleosynthesis of a wide range of progenitors from three different stellar evolution codes: FRANEC, KEPLER, and MESA. In particular, we show the differences between the neutrino-driven explosions simulated in this work and the much simpler bomb and piston models typically used in the literature. We then focus on the impact of different explodabilities and different explosion dynamics on the nucleosynthetic yields. We adopted the neutrino-driven core-collapse supernova explosion code GR1D+, i.e., a spherically symmetric model with state-of-the-art microphysics and neutrino transport and a time-dependent mixing-length model for neutrino-driven convection. We carried out explosions up to several seconds after bounce, then calculated the nucleosynthetic yields with the post-processing code SkyNet. We find that our 1D+ simulations yield explosion energies and remnant masses in agreement with observations of type II-P, IIb, and Ib supernovae, as well as with the most recent 3D simulations of the explosion. We provide a complete set of yields for all the stars simulated, including rotating, low-metallicity, and binary progenitors. Finally, we find that piston and bomb models, compared with more realistic neutrino-driven explosions, can artificially increase the production of Fe-peak elements, whereas the different explodabilities cause discrepancies in lighter elements.