Harman Patil (Editor)

S factor

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The astrophysical S-factor S(E) is a rescaled variant of the total cross section σ(E) that accounts for the Coulomb repulsion between charged reactants.

Contents

Definition

The quantity is defined as

S ( E ) ≡ E exp ⁡ ( − 2 π η ) σ ( E )

Here, η is the dimensionless Sommerfeld parameter,

η ≡ Z 1 Z 2 e 2 4 π ϵ 0 ℏ v

where

  • Z1 Z2 e2 is the product of the charges of the reactants and
  • v is the magnitude of the relative incident velocity.

    • Motivation

    The Coulomb barrier causes the cross section to have a strong exponential dependence on the center-of-mass energy E. The S-factor remedies this by factoring out the Coulomb component of the cross section.

    References

    S-factor Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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