Measurement of astrophysically important excitation energies of ⁵⁸Zn with GRETINA

¹ National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
² Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA
⁵ Physics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA
⁶ Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Rd, Berkeley CA, USA
⁷ IFIC, CSIC-University of Valencia, E-46071 Valencia, Spain
⁸ Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics, PO Box 103980, 69029 Heidelberg, Germany
⁹ Department of Physics, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI 49242, USA
¹⁰ Department of Applied Physics, University of Miyazaki, Miyazaki, Miyazaki 889-2192, Japan
¹¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803, USA
¹² Department of Physics, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859, USA

^a e-mail: langer@nscl.msu.edu

Published online: 20 March 2014

Abstract

The level structure of neutron-deficient ⁵⁸Zn has been extracted experimentally. This nucleus is important for the rapid proton-capture process. ⁵⁸Zn was produced by using a (d,n)-type transfer reaction on ⁵⁷Cu in inverse kinematics at beam energies of 75 MeV/u. Several γ-ray transitions have been identified. The experiment utilized the state-of-the-art GRETINA γ-ray energy tracking array in conjunction with the largeacceptance spectrometer S800 at NSCL. The excitation energies of the identified low-lying states in ⁵⁸Zn are important for constraining the ⁵⁷Cu(p,γ)⁵⁸Zn reaction rate under X-ray burst conditions.