Sensitivity studies on the excited states of nuclei in beta decays in the r-process of neutron star mergers

Abstract

Sensitivity studies conducted in this paper aim to examine the influence of uncertainties in beta decay rates on simulations of rapid neutron capture (r-process) nucleosynthesis. However, previous studies multiplied the ground states of the theoretical rates or the ground states of the experimental rates by 10, and most of the theoretical rates and the experimental rates consider only the beta decay rates of the ground states but not the rates in stellar conditions because of the thermally excited states. In this study, we performed the first sensitivity test on the excited states of nuclei having A > 120 in the r-process. The ground state beta decay rates and estimated excited state rates are folded together to estimate a thermal decay rate as a function of temperature. We examined how the thermally excited states affect the stellar rates for all A > 120 nuclei. We found that there is a slight change in the second peak of final abundance in the r-process by Lu isotopes. This is the same as that in Famiano’s paper (Famiano and Boyd 2008 J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 35 2).