Nuclear astrophysics requires a diverse set of research infrastructures for progress: telescopes for astronomical observations, nuclear laboratories to measure nuclear properties and rates, and supercomputers to compute complex stellar models. ChETEC-INFRA is a Starting Community of Research Infrastructures that networks altogether 13 such infrastructures from a variety of European countries.
From 2021-2025, ChETEC-INFRA provides free access to these infrastructures to researchers from any country, with proposals selected based on scientific excellence only. In addition, dedicated work packages improve the usability and accessibility of the three types of infrastructures and network them with each other, with the nuclear astrophysics community, and with other scientific disciplines.
ChETEC-INFRA includes a strong outreach component, with support to both established and new nuclear astrophysics scientific schools, outreach to high school students, to the detector industry, and to other stakeholders. Within ChETEC-INFRA, data are archived and catalogued for long-term sustainability beyond the end of the project, ranging from evaluated nuclear reaction rates to detailed abundance data for a multitude of stars to tracer nucleosynthesis calculations. The 32 ChETEC-INFRA partner institutions in 17 countries aim to serve both the European and international nuclear astrophysics communities and are networked with related efforts in the United States, China, and Japan.
To learn more about the activities of ChETEC-INFRA, please refer this overview.
The ChETEC-INFRA community builds on the success of the ChETEC COST Action CA16117 (Chemical Elements as Tracers of the Evolution of the Cosmos).