Monday, October 30, 2017, 1:30 PM, room 112
Craig Reingold
The Path Less Traveled: Studying p-process Nucleosynthesis at the Univerity of Notre Dame

P-process nucleosynthesis is responsible for the production of nuclei heavier than iron on the proton rich side of stability. Nuclei produced during this process are unobtainable from the r-process and s-process, as they are blocked from beta-decay by the stable nuclei. The p-process is network of photodisintegration reactions that occur in a supernova explosion on s-process nuclear seeds. Due to experimental constraints, it is difficult to measure these reactions in the laboratory. Instead, it is customary to measure capture reaction cross sections, and calculate the corresponding inverse radiative capture cross section using the principle of detailed balance. There is a variety of techniques utilized to measure the proton and alpha capture reactions of interest. At the University of Notre Dame, a new summing technique detector has been commissioned to measure (p,gamma) and (alpha,gamma) cross sections in regular kinematics. In this presentation, the commissioning of the High Efficiency Total Absorption Spectrometer (HECTOR) will be discussed, and the first cross sections relevant for the p-process measured with HECTOR will be discussed.



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