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 $^{130}$Te target was irradiated by an alpha beam to populate excited states in $^{133}$I through the $^{130}$Te($\alpha$, p$\gamma$)$^{133}$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 $^{132}$I is extracted and used as input to nuclear reaction codes like TALYS to provide astrophysical reaction rates on the radiative neutron-capture reaction $^{131}$I(n, $\gamma$)$^{132}$I of importance for the $i$ process.