Astro talk

Speaker

Anu Kankainen

University of Jyväskylä

Title

Mass measurements for nuclear astrophysics at IGISOL

Abstract

Nuclear masses and binding energies play a key role in elemental nucleosynthesis as they determine the energies for different reactions and decays. The masses need to be known with a sufficiently high precision in order to perform calculations accurately enough to be compared with the observations. Since the isotopes involved in the astrophysical processes are usually radioactive, the measurements require a facility to produce them. The IGISOL (Ion Guide Isotope Separator On-Line) facility, located in the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, provides low-energy radioactive beams in a chemically insensitive way for different kinds of beta decay, laser spectroscopy and mass measurement studies. The mass measurements are performed with the JYFLTRAP double Penning trap mass spectrometer with a typical precision of 10 ppb or better. Altogether around 300 isotopes have been measured with JYFLTRAP since it started its operation around 12 years ago. In this talk, I will focus on recent mass measurements relevant for nucleosynthesis in novae and type I X-ray bursts.