Abstract. Neutron capture cross sections in the keV range are critical for understanding nucleosynthesis in several important astrophysical environments. Certain key cross sections are also of relevance to reactor performance and design and for nuclear forensics. For decades. considerable effort has gone into measuring these cross sections where possible and modeling them where not. Theoretical estimates of unknown cross sections (usually using various statistical models combined with specific structural and reaction input) are often quite uncertain especially when they involve extrapolation to unknown cases. These limitations contribute to ambiguities in understanding various nucleosynthetic processes and delineating the sites where they occur. It is therefore of considerable importance to develop an improved method to correlate known cross sections and to predict new ones with higher accuracy and confidence. Here we present such a method, newly developed, that is simple, empirical, robust, model independent, and based on readily available empirical information. It can provide estimates of unknown cross sections often with accuracies of 20–40%, often for nuclei even quite far from stability, and often converts the estimation process from extrapolation to interpolation.

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