Search for: All records

Abstract Model-observation comparisons of type-I X-ray bursts (XRBs) can reveal the properties of accreting neutron star systems, including the neutron star compactness. XRBs are powered by nuclear burning, and a handful of reactions have been shown to impact the model results. Reactions in the NiCu cycles, featuring a competition between⁵⁹Cu(p,γ)⁶⁰Zn and⁵⁹Cu(p,α)⁵⁶Ni, have been shown to be among the most important reactions as they are a critical checkpoint inrp-process flow and significantly impact the light curves and burst ashes. We report a direct measurement of⁵⁹Cu(p,α)⁵⁶Ni, bringing stringent constraints on this reaction rate. New results rule out a strong NiCu cycle in XRBs, with a negligible degree of recycling, ≤5% up to 1.5 GK. The new reaction rate, when varied within new uncertainty limits, shows no impact on one-zone XRB model light curves tailored for clocked-bursterGS1826–24, hence removing an important nuclear physics uncertainty in the model-observation comparison. 

We used the 138Baðd; αÞ reaction to carry out an in-depth study of states in 136Cs, up to around 2.5 MeV. In this Letter, we place emphasis on hitherto unobserved states below the first 1þ level, which are important in the context of solar neutrino and fermionic dark matter (FDM) detection in large-scale xenon-based experiments. We identify for the first time candidate metastable states in 136Cs, which would allow a realtime detection of solar neutrino and FDM events in xenon detectors, with high background suppression. Our results are also compared with shell-model calculations performed with three Hamiltonians that were previously used to evaluate the nuclear matrix element (NME) for 136Xe neutrinoless double beta decay.We find that one of these Hamiltonians, which also systematically underestimates the NME compared with the others, dramatically fails to describe the observed low-energy 136Cs spectrum, while the other two show reasonably good agreement. 

A campaign of Coulomb-excitation experiments to study the electromagnetic structure of \(^{110}\)Cd was performed using beams of \(^{14}\)N, \(^{32}\)S, and \(^{60}\)Ni. The use of various reaction partners enables disentangling the contributions of individual electromagnetic matrix elements involved in the excitation process, yielding, among others, a precise determination of the lifetime of the 2\(^+_2\) state in \(^{110}\)Cd. AbstractPublished by the Jagiellonian University2025authors