Speaker: Lee Bernstein, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Title: Recent Nuclear Physics Results from NIF

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world’s premier inertial confinement fusion facility designed to achieved sustained thermonuclear burn (ignition) through the compression of Hydrogen isotopic fuels to densities in excess of 103 g/cm3 and temperature in excess of 100 MK. These conditions are very similar to that found in the cores of Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars where slow neutron capture (s-process), forms approximately half of the elements above Iron in the periodic table. However, accelerator-based measurements of s-process capture rates can be significantly different from what is seen in a star due to the effects of nuclear-plasma interactions. NIF, for the first time, offers the possibility of studying s-process neutron capture in a realistic stellar plasma environment. In this talk I will present an overview of recent results from NIF, including the first capture measurements, and present a plan for measuring s-process neutron capture cross sections using NIF. I will also describe the nuclear data needed for the interpretation of NIF neutron capture measurements and make suggestions for their measurement using low-energy accelerator facilities.