Applications of the Trojan Horse method in nuclear astrophysics

Abstract

Abstract. The study of the energy production in stars and related nucleosyntesis processes requires increasingly precise knowledge of the nuclear reaction cross section and reaction rates at interaction energy. In order to overcome the experimental difficulties, arising from small cross-sections involved in charge particle induced reactions at astrophysical energies, and from the presence of electron screening, it was necessary to introduce indirect methods. Trough these methods it is possible to measure cross sections at very small energies and retrieve information on electron screening effect when ultra-low energy direct measurements are available. The Trojan Horse Method (THM) represents the indirect technique to determine the bare nucleus astrophysical S-factor for reactions between charged particles at astrophysical energies. The basic theory of the THM is discussed in the case of non-resonant.

Reply to the Comments on the 12C+12C fusion S^*-factor

“…In fact, they refer to this application of the Trojan Horse Method published in Nature as the first one. It is not the first application at all since the method has been applied several times since the early nineties and tested to check experimentally if it is reliable ( [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and references therein). The authors of the Comment are perfectly aware of that since two of them have been coauthors of several of our papers.…”