Sensitivity of the r-process to nuclear masses

Abstract

The rapid neutron capture process (r-process) is thought to be responsible for the creation of more than half of all elements beyond iron. The scientific challenges to understanding the origin of the heavy elements beyond iron lie in both the uncertainties associated with astrophysical conditions that are needed to allow an r-process to occur and a vast lack of knowledge about the properties of nuclei far from stability. There is great global competition to access and measure the most exotic nuclei that existing facilities can reach, while simultaneously building new, more powerful accelerators to make even more exotic nuclei. This work is an attempt to determine the most crucial nuclear masses to measure using an r-process simulation code and several mass models (FRDM, Duflo-Zuker, and HFB-21). The most important nuclear masses to measure are determined by the changes in the resulting r-process abundances. Nuclei around the closed shells near N=50, 82, and 126 have the largest impact on r-process abundances irrespective of the mass models used.

5 pages, 4 figures, accepted in European Physical Journal A

References in corpus (4)

• The r-process of stellar nucleosynthesis: Astrophysics and nuclear physics achievements and mysteries
• Further explorations of Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mass formulas. XII: Stiffness and stability of neutron-star matter
• Dynamical r-process studies within the neutrino-driven wind scenario and its sensitivity to the nuclear physics input
• Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of A Rotating Massive Star Collapsing to A Black Hole

Cited by in corpus (19)

• The impact of individual nuclear properties on $r$-process nucleosynthesis
• SkyNet: A modular nuclear reaction network library
• The impact of individual nuclear masses on $r$-process abundances
• Precision mass measurements on neutron-rich rare-earth isotopes at JYFLTRAP - reduced neutron pairing and implications for the $r$-process calculations
• Isomeric states close to doubly magic ${}^{132}$Sn studied with JYFLTRAP
• Toward global beyond-mean-field calculations of nuclear masses and low-energy spectra
• Microscopic optical potential for exotic isotopes from chiral effective field theory
• Systematic study of shell gaps in nuclei
• Sensitivity study of \emph{r}-process abundances to nuclear masses
• Impact of new data for neutron-rich heavy nuclei on theoretical models for $r$-process nucleosynthesis
• Sensitivity studies for r-process nucleosynthesis in three astrophysical scenarios
• Mass Measurements of Neutron-Rich Gallium Isotopes Refine Production of Nuclei of the First r-Process Abundance Peak in Neutron Star Merger Calculations
• Impact of the first-forbidden $\beta$ decay on the production of $A\sim 195$ r-process peak
• Mass measurements of neutron-rich Rb and Sr isotopes
• The structure of 70Fe: Single-particle and collective degrees of freedom
• High Precision Binding Energies from Physics Informed Machine Learning
• The impact of nuclear masses near $N=82$ on $r$-process abundances
• Mass measurements in the ${}^{132}$Sn region with the JYFLTRAP double Penning trap mass spectrometer
• Further exploration of binding energy residuals using machine learning and the development of a composite ensemble model