Conveners
Astrophysics and Nuclear Data
- Filomena Nunes (MSU)
Nuclear astrophysics aims at describing the nuclear properties occurring in and powering astrophysical objects, as well as the cosmic origin of chemical elements found in the Universe. During this talk, I will present some recent progress and future challenges in the field of nuclear data for astrophysics, with a particular focus on the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements.
The phenomenology of atomic nuclei is bewildering: many thousands of different isotopes exist, each of which can differ dramatically from systems with just one less nucleon. This diversity makes nuclear structure interesting by itself, but the field is also crucial to progress in other domains: from precision searches for beyond-standard-model physics to the chemistry of superheavy nuclei. The...
Nuclear reaction models, implemented in nuclear reactions codes, require the knowledge of several inputs such as masses, nuclear levels and level densities, optical models, photon strength functions, and sometimes fission paths. For decades, analytical expressions have been used in nuclear reaction codes, due to the freedom they offer to the user to modify their associated parameters in order...
The effective Gogny interactions of the D1 family were established by D. Gogny more than forty years ago to describe simultaneously the mean field and the pairing field corresponding to the nuclear interaction. The most popular Gogny parametrizations, namely D1S, D1N, and D1M, describe accurately the ground-state properties of spherical and deformed finite nuclei all across the mass table...
beta-decay rates are fundamental to understanding r-process nucleosynthesis, which is responsible for producing roughly half of the heavy elements. Existing theoretical global calculations of the rates use either Skyrme or relativistic quasiparticle random phase approximation (QRPA). These models yield very different predictions and are limited due to their treatment of nuclear many-body...
