Nuclear structure studies of radioactive isotopes relevant for the nucleosynthesis

With the establishment of FAIR, the nuclear structure community is now heavily committed to a future programme of in-flight and decay gamma-ray spectroscopy of highly exotic nuclei produced from the SUPER-FRS. The PreSPEC project was established as a pre-cursor, which builds on the successful RISING results. In the fast-beam RISING campaign, relativistic Coulomb excitation, two-step fragmentation reactions and virtual photon scattering were all successfully used. The gained experience allowed to select PreSPEC-AGATA experiments which comprises exclusively topics of major significance in contemporary nuclear structure physics. These include the evolution (and modification) of shell structure with increasing neutron excess, the breakdown of isospin symmetry, the evaporation of the limits of nuclear existence near the drip-lines, the onset of collectivity in yet unexplored mass regions and the study of electric and magnetic dipole strength in nuclei.