Editorial: Nuclear physics and astrophysics in plasma traps

β-decay rates are a fundamental ingredient of stellar nucleosynthesis. In particular, elements heavier than iron are produced by a subtle interplay between neutron captures and β-decays, being r-, iand s-processes mechanisms driving the synthesis of neutron rich nuclei up to the limits imposed by nuclear stability. Therefore, any attempt to reproduce the observed abundances of heavy elements in the Universe calls for an accurate knowledge of neutron capture cross-sections and β-decay rates in a stellar environment as well as the comprehension of any possible mechanism affecting isotope times of life. Even though the β-decay constant has been measured for a wide range of nuclei, a major difference exists between laboratory and stellar conditions. Indeed, temperatures and densities may have very different values, ranging over several orders of magnitude, in the different nucleosynthesis environments. Therefore, stellar plasmas, where nucleosynthesis occurs, are not always fully ionized and when thermodynamical conditions affect the ionization degree of the involved atoms the β-decay process of their nuclei can be strongly modified too. This is particularly true for those nuclei whose βdecay Q value is small or slightly negative in the laboratory. In those cases, half-lives (t1/2) in stellar and terrestrial conditions are predicted to be different for a fixed type of transition at temperatures above a few keV. Such an effect was first shown in the seminal work by Takahashi and Yokoi published in 1987 (Takahashi and Yokoi, 1983; Takahashi and Yokoi, 1987), which investigated the in-plasma effects due to the temperature and the electron density on β-decay rates. Despite the pivotal importance of these data, the cited paper is so far the only one reporting the high temperature β-decay rate of several nuclei and after 35 years the Takashi and Yokoi values are still the most used in calculations of stellar and primordial nucleosynthesis. The first experimental evidence of the effect on β-decay of the high degree of ionization of atoms was found in Storage Rings (Litvinov and Bosch, 2011), which opened up the possibility of measuring β-decay rates in fully ionized atoms. Among the OPEN ACCESS