Databases and tools for nuclear astrophysics applications

BRUSsels Nuclear LIBrary (BRUSLIB), Nuclear Astrophysics Compilation of REactions II (NACRE II) and Nuclear NETwork GENerator (NETGEN)

Institut d’Astronomie et d’Astrophysique, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus de la Plaine CP 226, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
e-mail: sgoriely@ulb.ac.be

Received: 10 October 2012
Accepted: 16 November 2012

Abstract

An update of a previous description of the BRUSLIB + NACRE package of nuclear data for astrophysics and of the web-based nuclear network generator NETGEN is presented. The new version of BRUSLIB contains the latest predictions of a wide variety of nuclear data based on the most recent version of the Brussels-Montreal Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov model. The nuclear masses, radii, spin/parities, deformations, single-particle schemes, matter densities, nuclear level densities, E1 strength functions, fission properties, and partition functions are provided for all nuclei lying between the proton and neutron drip lines over the 8 ≤ Z ≤ 110 range, whose evaluation is based on a unique microscopic model that ensures a good compromise between accuracy, reliability, and feasibility. In addition, these various ingredients are used to calculate about 100 000 Hauser-Feshbach neutron-, proton-, α-, and γ-induced reaction rates based on the reaction code TALYS. NACRE is superseded by the NACRE II compilation for 15 charged-particle transfer reactions and 19 charged-particle radiative captures on stable targets with mass numbers A < 16. NACRE II features the inclusion of experimental data made available after the publication of NACRE in 1999 and up to 2011. In addition, the extrapolation of the available data to the very low energies of astrophysical relevance is improved through the systematic use of phenomenological potential models. Uncertainties in the rates are also evaluated on this basis. Finally, the latest release v10.0 of the web-based tool NETGEN is presented. In addition to the data already used in the previous NETGEN package, it contains in a fully documented form the new BRUSLIB and NACRE II data, as well as new experiment-based radiative neutron capture cross sections. The full new versions of BRUSLIB, NACRE II, and NETGEN are available electronically from the nuclear database at http://www.astro.ulb.ac.be/NuclearData. The nuclear material is presented in an extended tabular form complemented with a variety of graphical interfaces.