Influence of chaos on the fusion enhancement by electron screening

Abstract

We study the effect of screening by bound electrons in low energy nuclear reactions. We use molecular dynamics to simulate the reactions involving many electrons: D+d, D+D, 3He+d, 3He+D, 6Li+d, 6Li+D, 7Li+p, 7Li+ H. Quantum effects corresponding to the Pauli and Heisenberg principles are enforced by constraints in terms of the phase space occupancy. In addition to the well-known adiabatic and sudden limits, we propose a new “dissipative limit” which is expected to be important not only at high energies but in the extremely low energy region. The dissipative limit is associated with the chaotic behavior of the electronic motion. It affects also the magnitude of the enhancement factor. We discuss also numerical experiments using polarized targets. The derived enhancement factors in our simulation are in agreement with those extracted within the R-matrix approach.