of $^{56}$Ni confers it stability compared to any of its neighbors and the main path of the rp-process passes through $^{56}$Ni. These properties pointed to the fact that heavier nuclei may be produced by the rate of the radiative proton capture reaction $^{56}$Ni(p, $\gamma $)$^{57}$Cu and confirm the candidature of $^{56}$Ni as a waiting point nucleus in the reaction network. The rate of this reaction in the stellar kilns is due almost entirely to the first four resonances [@Zhou96] and particularly very sensitive to the location and structure of the low-lying states in daughter $^{57}$Cu. The pn-QRPA accounted well for these low-lying states in $^{57}$Cu. The proton separation energy of $^{57}$Cu is merely *Sp* = 694.87 keV [@Audi03a; @Audi03b], and so all of its excited states are resonances in this reaction. The authors in Ref. [@Zhou96] stressed that small changes in the binding and excitation energies lead to significant modifications of the predictions for the synthesis of proton rich isotopes with A $>$ 56 and possibly for the time evolution of cosmic x-ray bursts.

We calculated the ground state and excited states GT strength functions of $^{57}$Zn using the pn-QRPA model. The calculation was performed for a total of 259 