Investigating the role of the neutron Optical Potential in neutron-rich ⁵⁵V

(n,g) reactions are an extremely important ingredient to understand the origin of elements in the universe. Since these reactions are extremely complicated to analyze from first principles, phenomenological modes such as Hauser-Feshbach (HF) are often used to calculate reaction cross sections. One of important ingredient of the HF model is optical model (OM) parameters. The OM serves as an interacting potential in the Schrodinger equation that is used to calculate the transmission coefficients. However, OM parameters are highly uncertain off the line of stability due to the lack of experimental data. Therefore, we conduct an experiment using a ⁷Li beam on a ⁴⁸Ca target to estimate the OM parameters and reaction cross sections. Our findings indicate that the existing models are incapable of reproducing the experimental reaction cross sections. Specifically, the imaginary part of the neutron optical potential needs to be decreased by a factor of 4 and the level densities must be reduced in order to reproduce the experimental cross sections. These results could have a huge impact on our understanding of the origin of elements and offer new insights into the nucleosynthesis processes.