GridFire: A new, open source, nuclear network for stellar structure and evolution
Emily M. Boudreaux, Aaron Dotter
astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.SR
Submitted: 2026-06-13
Comments: 65 pages, 24 figures, submitted April 21st 2026, Accepted June 2nd 2026
Project page: https://4d-star.github.io/GridFire/html/index.html
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The gist: We present a novel nuclear network implementation, GridFire, which has been developed with a focus on efficiency, ease of use, and automatic physical extension.
Terminology
Abstract
We present a novel nuclear network implementation, GridFire, which has been developed with a focus on efficiency, ease of use, and automatic physical extension. In this first paper we provide a detailed overview of GridFire's numerics, performance characteristics, and a comparison to pre-existing nuclear network implementations pynucastro and MESA's net module. We find that generally GridFire performs similarly to and requires significantly less user input and setup than these current generation nuclear network codes. Further, GridFire has been developed with a flexible "view" based physics engine that allowing researchers to implement domain specific physics without modifying the underlying source code. GridFire has been released under an open-source license, GPL v3.0, and will eventually be incorporated into the forthcoming 4D-STAR stellar structure evolution code.
Sources
- The luminosity constraint on solar neutrino fluxes
- BBN with light dark matter
- New reaction rates for improved primordial D/H calculation and the cosmic evolution of deuterium
- New BBN limits on Physics Beyond the Standard Model from He4
- The Dartmouth Stellar Evolution Database
- Stellar Neutrino Emission Across The Mass-Metallicity Plane
- Implications of a new temperature scale for halo dwarfs on LiBeB and chemical evolution
- Solar Neutrinos: Status and Prospects
- Silicon Burning I: Neutronization and the Physics of Quasi-Equilibrium
- Silicon Burning II: Quasi-Equilibrium and Explosive Burning
- Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Time-Dependent Convection, Energy Conservation, Automatic Differentiation, and Infrastructure
- On the Equivalence of Automatic and Symbolic Differentiation
- Nuclear Weak Rates and Detailed Balance in Stellar Conditions
- Nuclear reaction rates and the primordial nucleosynthesis
- The Primordial Abundance of He4: An Update
- Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA)
- Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Pulsating Variable Stars, Rotation, Convective Boundaries, and Energy Conservation
- Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological parameters
- Astrophysical Reaction Rates From Statistical Model Calculations
- Self-consistent microscopic calculations for electron captures on nuclei in core-collapse supernovae
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