Abstract
The influence of the stellar plasma on the production and destruction of isomers is studied for the examples and . Individual electromagnetic transitions are enhanced predominantly by nuclear excitation by electron capture, whereas the other mechanisms of electron scattering and nuclear excitation by electron transition give only minor contributions. It is found that individual transitions can be enhanced significantly for low transition energies below keV. Transitions with higher energies above keV are practically not affected. Although one low-energy transition in is enhanced by up to a factor of , the stellar transition rates from low- to high- states via so-called intermediate states in and do not change significantly under -process conditions. The -process nucleosynthesis of and remains essentially unchanged.
3 More- Received 24 January 2010
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.81.055808
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