Global microscopic models for nuclear astrophysics applications

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Although important effort has been devoted in the last decades to measure reaction cross sections, major difficulties related to the specific stellar conditions remain (capture of charged particles at low energies, large number of nuclei and properties to consider, exotic species, high-temperature and/or high-density environments, …). In many astrophysical scenarios, only theoretical predictions can fill the gaps. The nuclear ingredients to the reaction models should preferentially be estimated from microscopic global predictions based on sound and reliable nuclear models which, in turn, can compete with more phenomenological highly-parametrized models in the reproduction of experimental data. The latest developments made in deriving the nuclear inputs of relevance for cross section calculations are reviewed. It mainly concerns nuclear masses, nuclear level densities and γ -ray strength functions. Emphasis is made on the recent development of reliable microscopic models for practical applications. It is shown that the properties of exotic neutron-rich nuclei are predicted to be significantly different if derived on the basis of microscopic models instead of the widely-used phenomenological approaches.