Influence of crystal structures on electron screening

Abstract

For nucleosynthesis calculations, precise reaction rates should be known at energies within the Gamow window. At these energies, electron screening cannot be neglected. Despite the significance of the effect, a huge disagreement between experimental data and theoretical predictions is still not understood. In order to address to this problem, we investigated the dependence of the electron screening potential on the target host lattice structure by measuring the rate of the 2H(19F,p)20F reaction in zirconium, titanium and palladium targets containing deuterium.