The electron screening puzzle and nuclear clustering

Abstract

Accurate measurements of nuclear reactions of astrophysical interest within, or close to, the Gamow peak, show evidence of an unexpected effect attributed to the presence of atomic electrons in the target. The experiments need to include an effective "screening" potential to explain the enhancement of the cross sections at the lowest measurable energies. Despite various theoretical studies conducted over the past 20 years and numerous experimental measurements, a theory has not yet been found that can explain the cause of the exceedingly high values of the screening potential needed to explain the data. In this letter we show that instead of an atomic physics solution of the "electron screening puzzle", the reason for the large screening potential values is in fact due to clusterization effects in nuclear reactions, in particular for reaction involving light nuclei.

6 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Physics Letters B

References in corpus (2)

• Measurement of the 10 keV resonance in the ${}^{10}$B($p,{\alpha }_0$)${}^7$Be reaction via the Trojan Horse Method
• Electric and magnetic response to the continuum for A=7 isobars in a dicluster model

Cited by in corpus (16)

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• Laboratory electron screening in nuclear resonant reactions
• First observation of electron emission from the DD threshold resonance
• Big Bang nucleosynthesis as a probe of new physics
• Cosmological Lithium Problems
• A Toy Model for Low Energy Nuclear Fusion
• Nuclear clustering and the electron screening puzzle
• Determination of electron screening potential of 6 Li(p,α)3 He reaction using MultiLayer Perceptron based neural network
• The Cosmological Lithium Problem Revisited
• Relativistic Coulomb Screening in Pulsational Pair Instability Supernovae
• Multi-Model Analysis of the Astrophysical $S(E)$ Factor for the ${}^9\mathrm{Be}(p,\alpha {)}^6\mathrm{Li}$ Reaction and Its Impact on Astrophysical Reaction Rates
• Applications of nuclear physics to a wider context: from molecules to stars passing through hypernuclei
• An overview of the scientific contribution of Andrea Vitturi to Nuclear Physics (being an account of the recent TNP19 meeting held in Padova)