Coalescence of binary neutron star give rise to electromagnetic emission , kilonova , powered by radioactive decays of r -process nuclei .
Observations of kilonova associated with GW170817 provided unique opportunity to study the heavy element synthesis in the Universe .
However , atomic data of r -process elements to decipher the light curves and spectral features of kilonova are not fully constructed yet .
In this paper , we perform extended atomic calculations of neodymium ( Nd , Z = 60 ) to study the impact of accuracies in atomic calculations to the astrophysical opacities .
By employing multiconfiguration Dirac-Hartree-Fock and relativistic configuration interaction methods , we calculate energy levels and transition data of electric dipole transitions for Nd II , Nd III , and Nd IV ions .
Compared with previous calculations , our new results provide better agreement with the experimental data .
The accuracy of energy levels was achieved in the present work 10 % , 3 % and 11 % for Nd II , Nd III and Nd IV , respectively , comparing with the NIST database .
We confirm that the overall properties of the opacity are not significantly affected by the accuracies of the atomic calculations .
The impact to the Planck mean opacity is up to a factor of 1.5 , which affects the timescale of kilonova at most 20 % .
However , we find that the wavelength dependent features in the opacity are affected by the accuracies of the calculations .
We emphasize that accurate atomic calculations , in particular for low-lying energy levels , are important to provide predictions of kilonova light curves and spectra .