Conveners
Session 4: Nuclear Astrophysics
- Fairouz Hammache (IJCLab Orsay)
The slow neutron capture process (s-process) is responsible for producing about half of the elemental abundances between Fe and Bi in our cosmos. It occurs in low mass stars (1-5 solar masses) during their Asymptotic Giant Branch phase, and in massive stars during He core, and C shell burning. Neutron capture cross sections at stellar neutron energies are a key input for stellar models to...
The K600 magnetic spectrometer at iThemba LABS has been augmented over the last few years with various ancillary detectors for coincidence measurements. One of these ancillary detector arrays is the Coincidence Array for K600 Experiments (the CAKE) which consists of double-sided silicon strip detectors.
One of the mainstays of the experimental programme of the K600 and the CAKE has been...
A neutron star is one of the possible end states of a massive star. It is compressed by gravity and stabilized by the nuclear degeneracy pressure. Despite its name, the composition of these objects are not exactly known. However, from the inferred densities, neutrons will most likely compose a significant fraction of the star’s interior. While all neutron stars are expected to have a...
Classical novae are thermonuclear explosions that take place in the H-rich envelopes of accreting white dwarfs in stellar binary systems. The material piles up under degenerate conditions, driving a thermonuclear runaway. The energy released by the suite of nuclear processes operating at the envelope heats the material up to peak temperatures of 100 - 400 MK. During these events, about...
