The pairing phase transition in an odd-even hot-rotating 69Zn nucleus has been investigated by using the reported nuclear level density (NLD) data, which were experimentally extracted from the γ-gated particle spectra. The experimental NLDs have been compared with those obtained within the microscopic exact pairing plus independent-particle model at finite temperature (EP+IPM) along with the results of other microscopic calculations such as the Hartree-Fock BCS (HFBCS) and Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov plus combinational (HFBC) methods. It is found that the experimental NLDs can be well described by the EP+IPM using the recommended quadrupole deformation parameter β2 = -0.164. Intriguingly, the heat capacity calculated using the EP+IPM NLD exhibits a sharp S-shape, which is not expected in such odd-even hot or hot-rotating system as reported earlier. Changing the deformation parameter β2 does not change much this S-shape. However, increasing or decreasing the pairing gaps could enhance or destroy the S-shaped heat capacity. Therefore, the S-shaped heat capacity in odd-even 69Zn nucleus is explained due to the deformation induced pairing correlation.

Theoretical nuclear reaction codes are crucial for studying cross-section and S-factors of nuclear reactions required for the thermonuclear reaction rate calculations. We analyze two reactions 8Li([Formula: see text])[Formula: see text]B and [Formula: see text]N([Formula: see text])[Formula: see text]O, using both TALYS and EMPIRE codes. We stress that these reactions are highly important for CNO cycle but the extent of involvement of experimental datasets are meager and conflicting. For the first reaction, the trend of experimental data has been predicted satisfactorily by the codes. The reaction rate is also matched with REACLIB calculation. However, in [Formula: see text]N([Formula: see text])[Formula: see text]O, none of the codes could predict the resonant structures in the experimental data at the lower energies. The importance of our work is a sincere attempt to validate the TALYS and EMPIRE predictions for cross-section, S-factor and the reaction rate, simultaneously.