Speaker
Description
The nucleosynthesis of elements heavier than iron remains an open question in nuclear astrophysics. In the last decade, the intermediate (i) neutron-capture process has attracted attention as a potential explanation for observed abundance patterns in for example the old halo stars in our Galaxy, that cannot be reproduced by the slow and rapid processes. Understanding the i-process requires reliable neutron-capture reaction rates for nuclei away from stability, which motivates the present work.
The work presents an experimental study performed at the Oslo Cyclotron Laboratory (OCL) where a $^{130}\mathrm{Te}$ target was irradiated by an alpha beam to populate excited states in $^{133}\mathrm{I}$ through the $^{130}\mathrm{Te}(\alpha, p\gamma)^{133}\mathrm{I}$ reaction. The emitted protons and $\gamma$ rays are measured by the SiRi and OSCAR detectors. By applying the Oslo method on the particle-$\gamma$ coincidence data, the nuclear level density and $\gamma$-ray strength function of $^{132}\mathrm{I}$ is extracted and used as input to nuclear reaction codes like TALYS to provide astrophysical reaction rates on the radiative neutron-capture reaction $^{132}\mathrm{I}(n, \gamma)^{133}\mathrm{I}$ of importance for the i process.