Open Access

Mario Mastromarco, Annamaria Mazzone, Cristian Massimi, Sergio Cristallo, Nicola Colonna, Oliver Aberle, Victor Alcayne, Simone Amaducci, Józef Andrzejewski, Laurent Audouin, Victor Babiano Suarez, Michael Bacak, Massimo Barbagallo, Samuel Bennett, Eric Berthoumieux, Damir Bosnar, Adam S. Brown, Maurizio Busso, Manuel Caamaño, Luis Caballero Ontanaya, Marco Calviani, Francisco Calviño Tavares, Daniel Cano-Ott, Adrià Casanovas Hoste, Francesco Cerutti, Enrico Chiaveri, Guillem Pere Cortés Rossell, Miguel Antonio Cortés-Giraldo, Luigi Cosentino, Lucia Anna Damone, Paul John Davies, Maria Diakaki, Mirco Dietz, César Domingo-Pardo, Rugard Dressler, Quentin Ducasse, Emmeric Dupont, Ignacio Durán, Zinovia Eleme, Beatriz Fernández Domínguez, Alfredo Ferrari, Isabel Maria Ferro Gonçalves, Paolo Finocchiaro, Valter Furman, Ruchi Garg, Aleksandra Gawlik, Simone Gilardoni, Kathrin Göbel, Enrique Miguel González Romero, Carlos Guerrero Sánchez, Frank Gunsing, Stephan Heinitz, Jan Heyse, David Jenkins, Erwin Jericha, U. Jiri, Arnd Rudolf Junghans, Yacine Kadi, Franz Käppeler, Atsushi Kimura, Ingrid Knapová, Michael Kokkoris, Yuri N. Kopatch, Milan Krtička, Cem Deniz Kurtulgil, Ion Ladarescu, Claudia Lederer-Woods, Jorge Lerendegui-Marco, Sarah-Jane Lonsdale, Daniela Macina, Alice Manna, Trinitario Martínez, Alessandro Masi, Pierfrancesco Mastinu, Emilio Andrea Maugeri, Emilio Mendoza Cembranos, Alberto Mengoni, Veatriki Michalopoulou, Paolo Maria Milazzo, María de los Ángeles Millán Callado, Federica Mingrone, Javier Moreno-Soto, Agatino Musumarra, Alexandru Negret, Francisco Ogállar Ruiz, Andreea Oprea, Nikolas Patronis, Andreas Pavlik, Jarosław Perkowski, Cristina Petrone, Luciano Piersanti, Elisa Pirovano, José Ignacio Porras Sánchez, Javier Praena, José Manuel Quesada Molina, Diego Ramos Doval, René Reifarth, Dimitri Rochman, Carlo Rubbia, Marta Sabaté-Gilarte, Alok Saxena, Peter Schillebeeckx, Dorothea Schumann, Adhitya Sekhar, Alastair Gavin Smith, Nikolay V. Sosnin, Peter Sprung, Athanasios Stamatopoulos, Giuseppe Tagliente, José Luis Taı́n Enríquez, Ariel Tarifeño-Saldivia, Laurent Tassan-Got, Benedikt Thomas, Pablo Torres-Sánchez, Andrea Tsinganis, Sebastian Urlaß, Stanislav Valenta, Gianni Vannini, Vincenzo Variale, Pedro Vaz, Alberto Ventura, Diego Vescovi, Vasilis Vlachoudis, Rosa Vlastou, Anton Wallner, Philip John Woods, Tobias J. Wright, Petar Žugec

• The (n, γ) cross sections of the gadolinium isotopes play an important role in the study of the stellar nucleosynthesis. In particular, among the isotopes heavier than Fe, 154Gd together with 152Gd have the peculiarity to be mainly produced by the slow capture process, the so-called s-process, since they are shielded against the β-decay chains from the r-process region by their stable samarium isobars. Such a quasi pure s-process origin makes them crucial for testing the robustness of stellar models in galactic chemical evolution (GCE). According to recent models, the 154Gd and 152Gd abundances are expected to be 15-20% lower than the reference un-branched s-process 150Sm isotope. The close correlation between stellar abundances and neutron capture cross sections prompted for an accurate measurement of 154Gd cross section in order to reduce the uncertainty attributable to nuclear physics input and eventually rule out one of the possible causes of present discrepancies between observation and model predictions. To this end, the neutron capture cross section of 154Gd was measured in a wide neutron energy range (from thermal up to some keV) with high resolution in the first experimental area of the neutron time-of-flight facility n_TOF (EAR1) at CERN. In this contribution, after a brief description of the motivation and of the experimental setup used in the measurement, the preliminary results of the 154Gd neutron capture reaction as well as their astrophysical implications are presented.