BRUSLIB: the Brussels nuclear library for astrophysics applications

Nuclear reaction rates are obviously quantities of fundamental importance in nuclear astrophysics. Important effort has been devoted in the last decades to measure reaction cross sections and many experimental compilations have now become available. Despite such effort, many nuclear astrophysics applications still require the use of theoretical predictions to estimate experimentally unknown rates. Most of the nuclear ingredients in the calculations of reaction rates need to be extrapolated in an energy or/and mass domain out of reach of laboratory simulations. In addition, important astrophysical applications (in particular the r‐ or p‐processes of nucleosynthesis) often involve a large number (thousands) of unstable nuclei, so that only global approaches can be used. For these reasons, when the nuclear ingredients to the reaction models cannot be determined from experimental data, use is made preferentially of microscopic or semi‐microscopic global predictions based on sound and reliable nuclear models w...