  One of the critical longstanding issues in nuclear physics is the origin of
the heavy elements such as platinum and uranium. The r-process hypothesis is
generally supported as the process through which heavy elements are formed via
explosive rapid neutron capture. Many of the nuclei involved in heavy-element
synthesis are unidentified, short-lived, neutron-rich nuclei, and experimental
data on their masses, half-lives, excited states, decay modes, and reaction
rates with neutron etc., are incredibly scarce. The ultimate goal is to
understand the origin of uranium. The nuclei along the pathway to uranium in
the r-process are in "Terra Incognita". In principle, as many of these nuclides
have more neutrons than 238U, this region is inaccessible via the in-flight
fragmentation reactions and in-flight fission reactions used at the present
major facilities worldwide. Therefore, the multi-nucleon transfer (MNT)
reaction, which has been studied at the KEK Isotope Separation System (KISS),
is attracting attention. However, in contrast to in-flight fission and
fragmentation, the nuclei produced by the MNT reaction have characteristic
kinematics with broad angular distribution and relatively low energies which
makes them non-amenable to in-flight separation techniques. KISS-II would be
the first facility to effectively connect production, separation, and analysis
of nuclides along the r-process path leading to uranium. This will be
accomplished by the use of a large solenoid to collect MNT products while
rejecting the intense primary beam, a large helium gas catcher to thermalize
the MNT products, and an MRTOF mass spectrograph to perform mass analysis and
isobaric purification of subsequent spectroscopic studies. The facility will
finally allow us to explore the neutron-rich nuclides in this Terra Incognita.
