BRUSLIB and NETGEN: the Brussels nuclear reaction rate library and nuclear network generator for astrophysics

Nuclear reaction rates are quantities of fundamental importance in astrophysics. Substantial efforts have been devoted in the last decades to measuring or calculating them. This paper presents a detailed description of the Brussels nuclear reaction rate library BRUSLIB and of the nuclear network generator NETGEN. BRUSLIB is made of two parts. The first one contains the 1999 NACRE compilation based on experimental data for 86 reactions with (mainly) stable targets up to Si. BRUSLIB provides an electronic link to the published, as well as to a large body of unpublished, NACRE data containing adopted rates, as well as lower and upper limits. The second part of BRUSLIB concerns nuclear reaction rate predictions to complement the experimentally-based rates. An electronic access is provided to tables of rates calculated within a statistical Hauser-Feshbach approximation, which limits the reliability of the rates to reactions producing compound nuclei with a high enough level density. These calculations make use of global and coherent microscopic nuclear models for the quantities entering the rate calculations. The use of such models makes the BRUSLIB rate library unique. A description of the Nuclear Network Generator NETGEN that complements the BRUSLIB package is also presented. NETGEN is a tool to generate nuclear reaction rates for temperature grids specified by the user. The information it provides can be used for a large variety of applications, including Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the energy generation and nucleosynthesis associated with the non-explosive and explosive hydrogen to silicon burning stages, or the synthesis of the heavy nuclides through the s-, α- and r-, rp- or p-processes.