Pair instability supernovae across cosmic time

Pair instability (PISNe) and pulsational pair instability supernovae (PPISNe) are a key to understand the final fate of massive stars. Despite the robust theoretical framework they are grounded in, we still do not have any uncontroversial detection of PISNe and PPISNe. The aim of this work is to investigate their event rate as a function of cosmic time, with particular focus on the effects of metallicity and binary evolution, and make a comparison with observational constraints. For this purpose, we use the population-synthesis code SEVN (Stellar EVolution for N-body) to produce catalogues of single and binary stellar populations. We feed these catalogues to the code CosmoRate, to evaluate the event rate density in cosmological epochs. From our simulations it appears that binary evolution is a key ingredient that enhances the rate of PISNe and PPISNe. We further speculate about a possible tension with observational constraints.