Stellar Reactions on Earth: Selected Topics

The proposed Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) will make it possible to produce and study more than a thousand new rare isotopes in the laboratory. A variety of other rare-isotope facilities are currently in use in the U.S., Europe,and Japan, and exciting projects are under planning. However, none of these projects can answer fundamental questions on the structure properties of therare nuclei without a clear understanding of the mechanisms involved inreactions performed with them. In this seminar I discuss various aspectsof nuclear structure and reactions, with emphasis on weakly-bound nuclei and reactions of astrophysical interest.