Horizons: nuclear astrophysics in the 2020s and beyond

Abstract

Nuclear astrophysics is a field at the intersection of nuclear physics and astrophysics, which seeks to understand the nuclear engines of astronomical objects and the origin of the chemical elements. This white paper summarizes progress and status of the field, the new open questions that have emerged, and the tremendous scientific opportunities that have opened up with major advances in capabilities across an ever growing number of disciplines and subfields that need to be integrated. We take a holistic view of the field discussing the unique challenges and opportunities in nuclear astrophysics in regards to science, diversity, education, and the interdisciplinarity and breadth of the field. Clearly nuclear astrophysics is a dynamic field with a bright future that is entering a new era of discovery opportunities.

Proposed Lunar Measurements of r-Process Radioisotopes to Distinguish the Origin of Deep-sea 244Pu

“…The studies recommended in this work capitalize on recent technical advances, including expanded capabilities at AMS facilities to perform high-resolution measurements and the promise of next-generation radioactive beam facilities to reduce the considerable nuclear physics uncertainties of nucleosynthetic yield estimates (Mumpower et al 2016;Horowitz et al 2019;Schatz et al 2022). We look forward to future studies of the deep-ocean crust-including more data on the 7 Mya SN Mio and earlier samples-as well as further data from sediments and the Antarctic snow.…”

The Influence of β-decay Rates on r-process Observables

“…We look forward to additional experimental efforts to measure beta-decay properties (Gade & Sherrill 2016;Aprahamian et al 2018;Tain et al 2018;Horowitz et al 2019;Allmond et al 2020;Savard et al 2020;Wu et al 2020;Schatz et al 2022), which will greatly help to reduce this source of uncertainty in the predictions of KN light curves and of abundance predictions. We also look forward to new theoretical predictions of the thermodynamic conditions in merging neutron stars, of fission yields and daughter products, and of neutron capture and alpha-decay rates, all of which have an important role to play.…”

pynucastro: A Python Library for Nuclear Astrophysics

“…It quickly grew beyond that role, as we recognized the need to explore reaction rates, determine which reactions are important in different environments, and generate networks for multidimensional hydrodynamics simulation codes. Nuclear experiments are constantly refining our understanding of nuclei and reactions (Schatz et al 2022), and we want to be able to use the most upto-date reaction rates in our simulations without having to manually update the simulation codes. pynucastro meets this need by interfacing with compilations of nuclear reaction rates and nuclear properties generating the Python or C++ code needed to integrate a reaction network in a simulation code.…”