Investigation of the D(3He, p)4He reaction on ZrD targets in the energy region of 16–34 keV

Abstract

The article is devoted to study of the D(3He, p)4He reaction in the 3He+ ion energy range EHe = 16÷34 keV (E= 6.41÷13.61 keV in the center-of-mass system) with a step of 2 keV. The goal of this paper was to determine experimentally the electron screening potential Ue and the enhancement factor of the D(3He, p)4He reaction using the deuterated metal targets ZrD with different crystal textures. In this work we present results of measuring the D(3He, p)4He reaction enhancement factor using the targets ZrD with Miller indices [111] and [100]. The ZrD targets was deposited on the stainless steel foil 50 μm thick. The protons of energy 14.7 MeV from the D(3He, p)4He reaction were detected by a scintillation detector based on the BC-404 scintillator 115 mm in diameter and 4 mm thick, which was placed in optical contact with the XP-2040 PMT. The measured enhancement factors of the D(3He, p)4He reaction much higher than for gas targets and energy behavior is not described by the classical exponential formula. The effect of the crystal structure of the targets is evident. The measured enhancement factors of the D(3He, p)4He reaction are higher for the ZrD target with a crystal structure characterized by the Miller index [100] than for the target with index [111], which probably indicates the contribution of channeling. A non-proportional increase of the enhancement factors for the D(3He, p)4He reaction in energy range 16÷22 keV probably indicates a low-lying resonance effect in 5Li.