This is all of the code necessary to run the MESA simulations presented in Guichandut & Cumming 2023:

The imprint of convection on Type I X-ray bursts: Pauses in photospheric radius expansion lightcurves

Designed to run with MESA version r15140. We made some additional changes to the source code (see mesa_source_code_changes/readme), but these are only necessary if you wish to use our pgstar inlists, and run simulations with the "close gaps" prescriptions (see paper).

The initial model ns_env.mod is created in make_env, which is a local copy of the MESA test suite problem, with some modifications for a NS with a mass of 1.4Msun, radius 12km, and iron-56 column depth of 1e11 g/cm2.

There are 4 inlists for a single burst. They are located in base/inlist_folder:

• inlist1_accrete: accrete solar onto the fresh NS until it ignites.
• inlist2_flash: follow the thermonuclear runaway and convection until the outer layers reach 90% of the Eddington luminosity.
• inlist3_relax_tau: relax the optical depth of the outer boundary to 2/3.
• inlist4_wind: run the hydrodynamic wind.

base/base_inlist is designed to cycle through each of these inlists. The scripts base/next_inlist and base/prev_inlist can go through the main inlist file and comment/un-comment the relevant lines.

In our paper, each run starts from the same ignition model, created by the first inlist (runs/make_ignition_model). Then, we vary the convective prescription in the second inlist, and the third and fourth are essentially the same.

Here's how to run our main model "Schwarzschild":

1. cd base && ./mk (compile mesa)
2. cp base_inlist_template base_inlist . Replace all intances of PATH with your own path where the code is installed. Do the same with inlist_folder/inlist1_accrete_template and inlist_folder/inlist2_flash_template (copy to same filenames without _template, and replace PATH).
3. cd ../runs/Schwarzschild && cp ../../base/base_inlist inlist (or to run this in the "Scratch" directory of a cluster, just copy the Schwarzschild directory there and cd to that instead...)
4. ../base/next_inlist Cycle once so that we start from the second inlist
5. ../base/star Run MESA
6. Repeat 4&5 two more times to do the rest of the simulation

A template script is included (template_run.sh) to do steps 3 through 6 automatically.

Note that these simulations are expensive. Both the flash and wind parts take tens of thousands of models to compute. For convenience, we provide the models at 90% Eddington in the runs/... directories.