Understanding Stellar Nucleosynthesis by Measuring Nuclear Level Densities via Proton Evaporation

Nuclear level densities are of great importance to astrophysical phenomena, which require an understanding of nuclear reaction rates. Existing theoretical Hauser-Feshbach models vary by factors of three or more when used to calculate reaction rates. Thus, additional measurements of nuclear level densities are necessary to improve existing models. The common method of using particle evaporation from compound nuclear reactions is known for its ability to study the nuclear level density. Proton evaporation is then a natural approach to further current understanding. EMPIRE was used to model proton-evaporation reactions, and preliminary results in the study of Al(12C,p) data from the Edwards Accelerator Laboratory will be presented. These results consist of outputs from two separate programs: the first is a sorting code, written in Fortran, that translates and organizes the files from the digital data acquisition hardware in the lab into a single output file for each run of the accelerator; the second is an analysis code, written in C++ and using the ROOT framework, which reads the sorted output file and calculates differential cross section as a function of angle and energy.