Quantifying Fission Fragment Uncertainties on r-process Observables

The rapid neutron capture ("r") process accesses extremely heavy, fissile nuclei, the vast majority of which lack experimental data describing their fission fragment distributions ("FFDs"). FFDs are an essential input in r-process models, particularly for very neutron-rich conditions such as the tidal outflows from neutron-star mergers. However, with little experimental guidance, it is unknown if fission models provide accurate FFD predictions. Not only is their accuracy unknown, but most model predictions lack robust statistics to quantify their model precision. This work aims to provide precision estimates on FFDs. Rather than propagate uncertainties directly through computationally intensive fission models, we implement a Gaussian Mixture Model to describe and easily adjust our FFDs. We demonstrate how uncertainties in FFDs propagate to observable stellar abundance patterns in an effort to quantify the impact that computationally more expensive FFD model uncertainties may have on these observables.