It is now well understood that the outbursts of "novae" are caused by the dumping of hydrogen-rich material from a binary companion onto a white dwarf and the detonation of this material by fusion reactions in the hot crusts of white dwarfs. However, the details of this process and the events leading up to the explosion are not well understood. For example, they rely on a set of unknowns affecting the evolution of close binary stars and the hydrody- namical evolution of the shock wave as it emanates from the star. The Principal Investigator (PI) will renew his study of these processes for three years. The projects to be focused during the grant period are the dumping of material onto magnetized white dwarfs, an understanding of the mechanisms required for the synthesis of medium-mass nuclei, the cause of the cessation of the nova outburst, and a study of the recurrence phenomenon in one subclass of novae. This work is expected to complement the work on explosive nucleosynthesis in supernovae, as it is now apparent that heavy nuclei must have been produced in a variety of sites in the early history of our Galaxy.
