[Mesa-users] Making binary evolution stop before mass loss/mass transfer starts

[Ali Pourmand]

Hi Evan,

Thanks for your reply. I also had this problem with the roche lobe scheme
though unfortunately, so I don’t know why that happened. If the condition
is based “on the radius exceeding the eggleton radius” as the source you
mentioned says, do you know if the photospheric radius is the one being
compared or not? Because it sometimes starts mass transfer even before this
criteria happens (which I manually add as a stopping condition for radius
size)

On Fri, Feb 24, 2023 at 3:07 PM Evan Bauer <evan.bauer.astro at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Ali,
>
> I think you could achieve what you want by setting the mdot_scheme to
> 'roche_lobe'. The default 'Ritter' scheme has an exponential ramp-up so
> that there will always be at least some small amount of mass transfer as
> the star approaches Roche lobe overflow before fully reaching the Roche
> lobe radius. See section 2.3.1 in MESA III
> <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015ApJS..220...15P/abstract>.
>
> Cheers,
> Evan
>
> On Feb 24, 2023, at 3:03 PM, Ali Pourmand via Mesa-users <
> mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I am using MESA to evolve binary systems, and I want them to stop before
> mass transfer initiates.
>
> I have tried manually stopping the run at the photospheric radius equal to
> the roche lobe size, but due to the fact that the mass transfer schemes are
> implicit, mass transfer starts in some cases anyway.
>
> I was wondering if there are any better "mdot_schemes" I could work with?
> Or is there any way to make the simulation stop once mass transfer stops.
> (even to set a lower limit on the initial mass, is there anything like that
> similar to the stop controls that do exist for radius?)
>
> best
> Ali Pourmand
> M.Sc. Student
> University of Alberta
>
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