Kavli Affiliate: Kaisey Mandel
| Summary:
We fit the multi-band light curves of 2,205 Type Ia supernovae (SNe~Ia) from the Zwicky Transient Facility DR2 with a one-zone radioactive decay model with a phenomenological addition to include Fe recombination physics. We find a strong correlation between inferred nickel mass and SALT2 stretch, which our simplified modelling links to longer diffusion times in more massive ejecta, offering a physical basis for the brighter-slower relation. SNe~Ia in low-mass hosts ($log_10(M_*/M_odot) < 10$) produce $approx 12%$ more $^56$Ni than those in high-mass hosts, linking the host-galaxy mass step to ejecta properties and hinting at metallicity or age-dependent burning efficiencies. A pseudo-bolometric comparison provides lower limits on the nickel masses, highlighting their sensitivity to SED-level assumptions. Injection-and-recovery tests with realistic ZTF sampling and the same model recover the nickel scale but show significant sensitivity to distance and opacity assumptions; individual-event point estimates are therefore model-dependent. Accounting for selection biases and broad individual-event posteriors, hierarchical modelling of 902 SNe ($z leq 0.06$) gives Gaussian population distributions with $μ_rm ej = 1.26 pm 0.01~M_odot$ ($σ_rm ej = 0.33 pm 0.01~M_odot$) and $μ_rm Ni = 0.64 pm 0.06~M_odot$ ($σ_rm Ni = 0.42 pm 0.02~M_odot$). This work provides a step towards physical characterization of the local SN~Ia population while quantifying diversity and environmental dependencies relevant to progenitor physics and precision cosmology.
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