"Nuclear thermometers" reveal the origin of the universal r-process nucleosynthesis

Abstract

The resembling behaviour of giant dipole resonances built on ground and excited states supports the validity of the Brink-Axel hypothesis and assigns giant dipole resonances as spectroscopic probes -- or ``nuclear thermometers'' -- to explore the cooling of the kilonova ejecta in neutron-star mergers down to the production of heavy elements beyond iron through the rapid-neutron capture or r-process. In previous work, we found a slight energy increase in the giant dipole resonance built on excited states at the typical temperatures of $1.0\gtrapprox T\gtrapprox0.7$ MeV where seed nuclei are produced, before ongoing neutron capture. Crucial data are presented here supporting an enhanced symmetry energy at $T=0.51$ MeV (or $5.9\times 10^9$ K) -- where the r-process occurs -- that lowers the binding energy in the Bethe-Weizs\"acker semi-empirical mass formula and results in the close in of the neutron drip line. Ergo, providing an origin to the universality of elemental abundances by limiting the reaction network for r-process nucleosynthesis. An enhanced symmetry energy away from the ground state is further supported by shell-model calculations of the nuclear electric dipole ({\sc E1}) polarizability -- inversely proportional to the symmetry energy -- as a result of the destructive contribution of the products of off-diagonal {\sc E1} matrix elements.