Databases and tools for nuclear astrophysics applications

Abstract

An update of a previous description of the BRUSLIB + NACRE package of nuclear data for astrophysics and of the web-based nuclear network generator NETGEN is presented. The new version of BRUSLIB contains the latest predictions of a wide variety of nuclear data based on the most recent version of the Brussels-Montreal Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov model. The nuclear masses, radii, spin/parities, deformations, single-particle schemes, matter densities, nuclear level densities, E1 strength functions, fission properties, and partition functions are provided for all nuclei lying between the proton and neutron drip lines over the 8 ≤ Z ≤ 110 range, whose evaluation is based on a unique microscopic model that ensures a good compromise between accuracy, reliability, and feasibility. In addition, these various ingredients are used to calculate about 100 000 Hauser-Feshbach neutron-, proton-, α-, and γ-induced reaction rates based on the reaction code TALYS. NACRE is superseded by the NACRE II compilation for 15 charged-particle transfer reactions and 19 charged-particle radiative captures on stable targets with mass numbers A < 16. NACRE II features the inclusion of experimental data made available after the publication of NACRE in 1999 and up to 2011. In addition, the extrapolation of the available data to the very low energies of astrophysical relevance is improved through the systematic use of phenomenological potential models. Uncertainties in the rates are also evaluated on this basis. Finally, the latest release v10.0 of the web-based tool NETGEN is presented. In addition to the data already used in the previous NETGEN package, it contains in a fully documented form the new BRUSLIB and NACRE II data, as well as new experiment-based radiative neutron capture cross sections. The full new versions of BRUSLIB, NACRE II, and NETGEN are available electronically from the nuclear database at http://www. astro.ulb.ac.be/NuclearData. The nuclear material is presented in an extended tabular form complemented with a variety of graphical interfaces.

Evaluation of neutron capture cross section on 205Pb with photonuclear data

“…This MACS is compared with the data of KADoNiS [17], BRUSLIB [18] and Tonchev et al [19] as well as that calculated from TENDL-2015 in Fig. 3.…”

Towards many-body based nuclear reaction modelling

“…9001 Tables of nuclear level densities, E1 gamma-ray strengths, nuclear matter densities, fission paths have all been determined from the sole BSk14 interaction and are available either in the RIPL-3 [25] library, in the TALYS code [29] or the BRUSLIB nuclear data library [30]. In the latest TALYS version, however, the theoretical nuclear masses are those obtained with BSk17 [11], the first interaction providing a root mean square deviation with experimental masses lower than 600 keV.…”

“…Using such ingredients has already shown interesting features which can clearly not be addressed with traditional phenomenological approaches. An example, illustrated in Figure 4, concerns the possibility offered to study continuum spin and parity distribution deviating from the statistical hypothesis with a significant impact on isomer production [30].…”

STARLIB: A next-generation reaction-rate library for nuclear astrophysics

“…These are important for a number of issues, including: (1) rate estimates for reactions where no experimental nuclear physics information exists; (2) estimation of stellar rates from experimental rates, and extrapolation of Experimental data are taken from the compilation of Bao et al (2000), as well as from more recent measurements compiled in Xu et al (2013). Note that for the heavier target nuclei (A 50), most experimental and theoretical values agree within a factor of two.…”

“…See, in particular, the compilation of Bao et al (2000) and references found in Xu et al (2013). For those reactions, TALYS (laboratory) Maxwellian-averaged cross sections are normalized using the experimental value at 30 keV to ensure an accurate description in the whole temperature range, the Hauser-Feshbach being known to provide a proper description of the energy dependence of the reaction cross section.…”