• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevC.80.035801
• Corpus ID: 119199021

Suppression of the stellar enhancement factor and the reaction 85Rb(p,n)85Sr

@article{Rauscher2009SuppressionOT,
  title={Suppression of the stellar enhancement factor and the reaction 85Rb(p,n)85Sr},
  author={Thomas Rauscher and G{\'a}bor Gyula Kiss and Gy. Gyurky and A. Simon and Zs. Fulop and E. Somorjai},
  journal={Physical Review C},
  year={2009},
  volume={80},
  pages={035801}
}

• T. Rauscher, G. Kiss, +3 authors E. Somorjai
• Published 21 August 2009
• Physics
• Physical Review C

Astrophysical reaction rates are central to tracing changes in the abundances of nuclei by nuclear reactions. They provide the temperature- and density-dependent coefficients entering reaction networks, the large sets of coupled differential equations required to study nucleosynthesis and energy generation in astrophysical environments. The reaction rates are computed from reaction cross sections which, in turn, may be predicted in theoretical models or extracted from experiments. In addition to the difficulties arising in the determination of the cross sections, the conversion to reaction rates is further complicated by modifications of the rates in a hot plasma and the fact that the rates of forward and reverse rate for the same reaction have to be consistent to ensure numerical stability and proper equilibrium abundances at high temperature. Both issues can be addressed at once by accounting for the thermal population of target states which leads to stellar rates obeying a reciprocity relation between forward and reverse rate. Using this reciprocity, knowledge of the rate in only one direction is needed because the other reaction direction can be directly computed from that rate, thus ensuring consistency. For numerical reasons, further elaborated in Sec. IIB, it is usually preferable to start from the rate of a reaction with positive reaction Q value when computing the rate for its inverse reaction. Even more importantly, experimentalists want to determine rates as close as possible to the actual stellar rates, i.e. rates with minimal thermal population effects of the target. Again, it can be argued that this is the case for exothermic reactions. This led to the commonly applied rule that measurements of exothermic reactions are more important than those of endothermic ones. In this paper we show that there is a