First measurement of the 18O(p,α)15N cross section at astrophysical energies

Abstract

The 18O(p,α)15N reaction rate has been deduced by means of the Trojan horse method. For the first time the contribution of the 20 keV resonance has been directly evaluated, giving a value about 35% larger than the one in the literature. Moreover, the present approach has allowed to improve the accuracy by a factor 8.5, as it is based on the measured strength instead of spectroscopic measurements. The contribution of the 90 keV resonance has been also determined, which turned out to be of negligible importance to astrophysics. © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd.