Experimental determination of astrophysical reaction rates with radioactive nuclear beams

Abstract

Nuclear astrophysics is one of the basic and indispensable fields for the science of the Universe. Nuclear reactions play an important role in the evolution of the Universe. The large amount of energy stored in atomic nuclei plays a decisive role in the evolution of the Universe [1–3]. The origin and the distribution of the elements are other important factors for understanding the Universe and the constituents of our world. Nuclear reactions cause synthesis of a variety of elements from light to very heavy ones in the Universe. The environmental conditions for nuclear burning are dependent on the stellar sites, which characterize the scenario of burning such as the CNO cycle in the hydrogen burning stage in massive stars. Recent progress is summarized for instance in Refs. [4–10]. Observation of elemental abundance, on the other hand, provides important clues for understanding not only various phenomena but also the evolution of the Universe. Detailed abundance ratios have been observed optically for several novae, where heavy elements such as Si and S were observed, which should have been produced in the explosive nucleosynthesis [11]. These allow us to investigate the nucleosynthesis in novae quantitatively. Investigation of isotopic anomalies in meteorites [12,13] also provides interesting information for understanding explosive nuclear burning. Recently,