Evidence for an Intense Neutrino Flux during [ITAL]r[/ITAL]-Process Nucleosynthesis?

We investigate the possibility that neutrino capture on heavy nuclei competeswith beta decay in the environment where the $r$-Process elements aresynthesized. We find that such neutrino capture is not excluded by existingabundance determinations. We show that inclusion of significant neutrinocapture on the (neutron number) N=82 waiting point nuclei can allow theinferred abundances of these species to provide a good fit to steady weak (betadecay plus neutrino capture) flow equilibrium. In fact, for particular choicesof neutrino flux conditions, this fit is improved over the case where nucleichange their charge by beta decay alone. However, this improved fit can berealized only if neutrino capture plays a negligible role in nuclear decay backtoward stability. We discuss the implications of these considerations forcurrent proposed sites and models for $r$-Process nucleosynthesis.Comment: 10 pages, plain tex, submitted to ApJ