Measurements of astrophysical neutron capture cross sections via the inverse reaction Original Research Article

Neutron capture of short-lived isotopes can be important within several astrophysical environments. The laboratory investigation of these reactions can be difficult since these isotopes cannot form a target. We used radioactive beams and measured the inverse reaction instead. Particularly we used 15C and 9Li beams to measure the 14C(n, γ)15C, and 8Li(n, γ)9Li reactions. We determined the reaction rates within the astrophysically interesting temperature range. Our data for the 14C capture rises quickly up to 8μb and then it decreases by a factor of two at 1 MeV. We investigated neutron capture by 8Li which is one possible leak of the bridging reaction 8Li(α, n)11B of the A=8 gap. We found that this leak is lower than the theoretical expectations.