New Techniques for the Analysis of Astrophysical Nucleosynthesis

The extreme conditions that can arise in astrophysical environments enable nuclear transmutation processes to take place, by which atomic nuclei interact with their environment or decay to form new nuclei. Insofar as different astrophysical environments may foster certain transmutation processes but not others, these environments may be categorized by the different types of nucleosynthesis that occur in each; one of the primary goals of nuclear astrophysics, then, is to explain how these different nucleosynthesis sources produce all of the chemical elements observed in the universe, beginning with the primordial hydrogen and helium produced during the Big Bang. In this work, I develop a collection of computational tools and analytical techniques that provide insight into astrophysical nucleosynthesis, specifically in the areas of quantitatively propagating uncertainties from nuclear properties to nucleosynthesis calculations; isolating the specific role of individual nuclear properties in complex nucleosynthesis processes; and combining nucleosynthesis calculations with astrophysical observations to evaluate nuclear models. In each case, I investigate applications to the rapid neutron capture process (r process) of nucleosynthesis, which is expected to be the formation mechanism for the heaviest elements observed in the universe.