Investigation of strong interactions between light nuclei at superlow energies using Z-pinch plasma flow

Abstract

In the last 10 years, the advent of high power ion beams (HPIB) gave new opportunities to use them as an instrument in some areas of the applied and fundamental physics such as: plasma coherent radiation, equation of solid state, controlled fusion, stability issues. This paper suggests the novel HPIB application for fundamental nuclear physics, namely for the measurement of nuclear reaction cross-sections of light elements in the range of infra low energies of 100-2000 eV. In fact, existing experimental data on cross-sections for those reactions covers the range only above 6-10 keV and respective values are higher than 10/sup -31/ cm/sup 2/. The proposed novel approach will decrease several orders the threshold value of cross-sections measured and provide new information on charge symmetry of nuclear forces and on the mechanism involving exchange meson currents. We propose to use the high intensity radially converging ion flow generated during the plasma liner implosion at the high power pulsed generator. For the d+d, d+t, p+d reactions products' registration the scintillator X-rays, neutron spectrometers and charge particle track detectors will be used. The lower threshold of the cross-section value measured by the proposed method could be as low as 10/sup -40/ cm/sup 2/. In the paper are given the various experimental schemes, calculations of the cross-section values and results of the preliminary study.