20Ne(p,g)21Na Cross Section Study with the Notre Dame 5U Accelerator

In stars whose temperature is greater than 0.05 GK, hydrogen burning can proceed via the NeNa cycle, which is important for the nucleosynthesis of Ne, Na, and Mg isotopes. The first reaction in this cycle is 20Ne(p,g)21Na, which also has the slowest proton capture reaction rate (Iliadis et al., 2001), thereby influencing the rest of the cycle. The stellar reaction rate for 20Ne(p,g)21Na is dominated by direct capture and the high energy tail of a sub-threshold resonance. The aim of this work is to understand the direct-capture component of this reaction. Using Notre Dame’s recently commissioned 5U-4 accelerator, the 20Ne(p,g)21Na cross-section has been measured relative to the 1169 keV resonance at low energies using the Rhinoceros gas target. The resonance strength of the 1169 keV resonance was also independently determined. Finally, the cross sections were analyzed with the Notre Dame’s R-matrix code AZURE.