Widths of astrophysically important resonances in ¹⁸Ne

B. Harss, Argonne National Laboratory
C. L. Jiang, Argonne National Laboratory
K. E. Rehm, Argonne National Laboratory
J. P. Schiffer, Argonne National Laboratory
J. Caggiano, Argonne National Laboratory
P. Collon, Argonne National Laboratory
J. P. Greene, Argonne National Laboratory
D. Henderson, Argonne National Laboratory
A. Heinz, Argonne National Laboratory
R. V.F. Janssens, Argonne National Laboratory
J. Nolen, Argonne National Laboratory
R. C. Pardo, Argonne National Laboratory
T. Pennington, Argonne National Laboratory
R. H. Siemssen, Argonne National Laboratory
A. A. Sonzogni, Argonne National Laboratory
J. Uusitalo, Argonne National Laboratory
I. Wiedenhöver, Argonne National Laboratory
M. Paul, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
T. F. Wang, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
F. Borasi, Northwestern University
R. E. Segel, Northwestern University
J. C. Blackmon, ORNL Physics Division
M. Smith, ORNL Physics Division
A. Chen, Yale University
P. Parker, Yale University

Abstract

The astrophysically important reaction 14O(α,p)17F has been studied through a measurement of the time-inverse p(17F,α)14O reaction using a radioactive 17F beam. Resonance parameters for several states above an excitation energy of 7 MeV in 18Ne have been obtained. Through a measurement of the partial widths for elastic and inelastic proton scattering, it was determined that for these resonances the contribution of the 14O(α,p)17F* branch populating the first excited state in 17F is small. The results indicate that the contribution of resonances above Ex=7 MeV to the astrophysical (α,p) reaction rate is smaller than was previously assumed.