Improving explosive nucleosynthesis models via (n,alpha) measurements

In explosive environments, (gamma,alpha) reactions constitute some of the most important links in the nucleosynthesis chains. However. it is very unlikely that the rates for most of these reactions will be determined by direct experiments and these rates also are currently very poorly constrained by theory. In this paper, we demonstrate that low-energy (n,alpha) measurements constitute an important new global technique for considerably reducing the uncertainties in (gamma,alpha) reaction rates.