Speaker
Description
νp-process in supernovae produces light p-nuclei. The (n,p) reactions on Ge isotopes control how much matter flows toward heavy nuclei, but existing reaction rates rely on phenomenological models with unknown uncertainties.
We computed new (n,p) reaction rates in the Ge-Ga region using microscopic optical potentials derived from chiral nuclear forces, compared them with the standard JINA library, and tested their impact on nucleosynthesis.
The chiral potentials give systematically different rates. The choice of optical potential shifts the final abundance pattern of p-nuclei in ways that cannot be covered by simply scaling the old rates up or down. Notably, neighboring isotopes respond very differently — one reaction can dramatically redistribute matter along the mass chain while the next hardly matters at all. This suggests that optical potential uncertainties, rather than statistical model parameters, are the dominant source of error for these reactions.
| Category | Theory |
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