Abstract
The study of energy production and nucleosynthesis in stars requires an increasingly precise knowledge of the nuclear reaction rates at the energies of interest. To overcome the experimental difficulties arising from the small cross sections at those energies and from the presence of the electron screening, the Trojan Horse Method has been introduced. The method provides a valid alternative path to measure unscreened low-energy cross sections of reactions between charged particles, and to retrieve information on the electron screening potential when ultra-low energy direct measurements are available.
Highlights
The Trojan Horse Method (THM) has been introduced in nuclear astrophysics as an indirect approach to determine low-energy cross sections overcoming the main issues of direct experiments, such as the Coulomb repulsion and the electron screening [1, 2]
The first one is responsible for the exponential decrease of the cross section at the relevant temperatures, while the electron screening, due to the electrons surrounding the interacting ions, leads to an increased cross section compared to the one for bare nuclei that is necessary to assess the reaction rate in astrophysical plasma
The choice of the three-body process is done in such a way that target a has a wave function with a large amplitude for a x − s cluster configuration, x being the target of the two-body reaction
Summary
The Trojan Horse Method (THM) has been introduced in nuclear astrophysics as an indirect approach to determine low-energy cross sections overcoming the main issues of direct experiments, such as the Coulomb repulsion and the electron screening [1, 2]. The THM ([3,4,5,6] and references therein) makes use of a suitable A + a→b + B + s two-to-three body process to measure the astrophysical A + x→b + B two-body reaction of interest by means of a relation between the two based on nuclear reaction theories. The selected part of the three-body phase space conveys with the quasi-free (QF) kinematics: the other cluster s remains spectator to the process, and A + x→b + B can be regarded as a half-off-energyshell (HOES) two-body reaction, usually referred to as a QF reaction. There is no additional Coulomb barrier between A and avy ions or from n the subsequent the constituent kinetic energy poaf rtthiceleTxHorfetahce2tiTonH-ins ucchleousesna ,toonbcee the initial above the
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