The r-process nucleosynthesis: a continued challenge for nuclear physics

Abstract Although important effort has been devoted in the last decades to measure decay half-lives and reaction cross sections, the r-process involve so many exotic nuclei for which so many different properties need to be known that only theoretical predictions can fill the gaps. For r-process applications, the nuclear ingredients to the reaction models should preferentially be estimated from microscopic global predictions based on sound and reliable nuclear models which, in turn, can compete with more phenomenological highly-parametrized approaches in the reproduction of experimental data. The latest microscopic developments made in deriving the nuclear inputs of relevance for nucleosynthesis applications are reviewed. It mainly concerns nuclear structure properties (atomic masses, deformations, radii, etc…), nuclear level densities, nucleon-nucleus optical potentials and γ-ray strength functions. In the light of recent microscopic models, it is shown that all these nuclear properties of exotic neutron-rich nuclei are significantly different from what has until now been predicted by phenomenological approaches. For exotic nuclei, radiative neutron capture rates obtained on the basis of microscopic models are found to be drastically smaller than those estimated until now. This result has far-reaching implications on our understanding of the r-process nucleosynthesis.