Research Projects

Nuclear reactions play a crucial role in the structure of various stars, including main-sequence stars, giant stars, supergiants, pre-supernovae, white dwarfs, and neutron stars. These reactions can involve light to heavy, stable to unstable, long-lived to short-lived nuclei, even halos. Fusions at low energies are essential for light element production in big bang nucleosynthesis and the stellar core. The nuclear fusion cross-section is a crucial physical quantity for research design in fusion engineering. In the astrophysical energy range, fusion can be described by quantum mechanical tunneling through the mutual Coulomb barrier of fusing nuclei. A complex nuclear potential can describe the absorption of a projectile in the nuclear potential well. The energy dependence of cross-sections, astrophysical S-function, and reaction rates for sub-barrier fusion reactions of light nuclei can be computed using this simplistic and robust model. At energies much below the Coulomb barrier, barrier penetrability can be approximated by exp(−2π Xi), allowing for the charge induced cross-section to be factorized as σ(E) = S(E) exp(−2π Xi)/E. The major goal of this study is to compute the S-function adopting the selective resonant tunneling model (SRTM), a robust model where fusion happens in a single step. The S-function obtained by SRTM will ease computation of fusion cross-section and reaction rates, which can be calculated by folding the fusion cross-section into the Maxwell-Boltzmann energy distribution function.