s-process element

History

A calculable model for creating the heavy isotopes from iron seed nuclei in a time-dependent manner was not provided until 1961. That work showed that the large overabundances of barium observed by astronomers in certain red-giant stars could be created from iron seed nuclei if the total neutron flux (number of neutrons per unit area) was appropriate. It also showed that no one single value for neutron flux could account for the observed s-process abundances, but that a wide range is required. The numbers of iron seed nuclei that were exposed to a given flux must decrease as the flux becomes stronger. This work also showed that the curve of the product of neutron-capture cross section times abundance is not a smoothly falling curve, as BFH had sketched, but rather has a ledge-precipice structure. A series of papers in the 1970s by Donald D. Clayton utilizing an exponentially declining neutron flux as a function of the number of iron nuclei exposed became the standard model of the s-process and remained so until the details of AGB-star nucleosynthesis became sufficiently advanced that they became a standard model for s-process element formation based on stellar structure models. Important series of measurements of neutron-capture cross sections were reported from Oak Ridge National Lab in 1965 and by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology's Nuclear Physics Center in 1982 and subsequently, these placed the s-process on the firm quantitative basis that it enjoys today.