Sensitivity study of \emph{r}-process abundances to nuclear masses

Abstract

The impact of nuclear mass uncertainties on the \emph{r}-process abundances has been systematically studied with the classical \emph{r}-process model by varying the mass of every individual nucleus in the range of $\pm 0.1$ to $\pm 3.0\mathrm{MeV}$ based on six different mass models. A new quantitative relation between the uncertainties of \emph{r}-process abundances and those of the nuclear masses is extracted, i.e., a mass uncertainty of $\pm 0.5\mathrm{MeV}$ would lead to an abundance uncertainty of a factor around 2.5. It is found that this conclusion holds true for various mass models.

Comments: 13 pages, 4 figures