Speaker
Description
Molecular astrophysics in supernova is gaining momentum in recent years, especially since the start of the science mission of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Applying radiative transfer theory is a key to connect these two fields of research: we can take into account molecular abundances and generate model spectra, which could allow us to deduce molecular components in the supernova material. I am working with radiative transfer codes, without the convenience of local thermal equilibrium (non-LTE), so the population of molecular states are not determined by the Boltzmann equation only. For non-LTE calculations, we need to know the collisional transfer rates for the typical collisional partners, which are mostly known to molecules and physical circumstances found in protoplanetary disks or in the interstellar medium.
My goal is to get these collisional transfer rates for supernova environments: to achieve it, I need to calculate potential energy surfaces of specific molecular systems, using quantum scattering theorem. Here I present the main steps of the methodology, as well as preliminary results on CO-O collisions, which can be an important step to model CO molecular transitions seen in JWST spectra of different types of supernovae.