23–27 Oct 2017
Havana, Cuba
America/Havana timezone

$^7$Be(p,γ)$^8$B: how EFT and Bayesian analysis can improve a reaction calculation

23 Oct 2017, 13:30
25m
Room "Benigno Souza"

Room "Benigno Souza"

Parallel Talk Nuclear Structure, Nuclear Reactions and Exotic Nuclei Parallel Sessions - NUC

Speaker

Daniel Phillips (Ohio University)

Description

The reaction $^7$Be(p,γ)$^8$B generates most of the high-energy neutrinos emanating from the pp-fusion chain in our Sun. Over the past twenty years there has been a substantial effort to measure its cross section at center-of-mass energies below 500 keV. One goal of this effort was accurate extrapolation of the astrophysical S-factor to solar energies. I will explain our treatment of this problem (Zhang et al., Phys. Lett. B 751, 535 (2015)), which uses an effective field theory (EFT) for $^7$Be(p,γ)$^8$B and Bayesian methods to perform the extrapolation. We find a zero-energy S-factor S(0)=21.3$\pm$0.7 eV–an uncertainty smaller by a factor of two than previously recommended. This improvement occurs because the EFT encapsulates all plausible low-energy models of the process, and so model selection for this problem can be accomplished in a rigorous and statistically meaningful way.

Primary authors

Xilin Zhang (University of Washington) Ken Nollett (San Diego State University) Daniel Phillips (Ohio University)

Presentation materials

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