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Abstract

Plasma screening effects affect the rate at which nuclear reactions occur in hot and dense
astrophysical plasmas. Their direct measurement in the laboratory has not succeeded
so far and is vital for our understanding of nuclear processes occurring in stellar nucleosynthesis.
A promising route for such measurements involve petawatt laser facilities
capable of producing hot and dense plasmas in the laboratory. In this work, we consider
and compare theoretically four plasma screening models originally introduced for astrophysical
plasmas, and apply them to nuclear reactions in laser-generated plasmas for
a large range of densities and temperatures. We consider two astrophysically relevant
nuclear reactions, namely ¹³C(α, n) ¹⁶O, which is one of the important helium burning
processes in advanced stellar phases as well as one of the interesting neutron sources
for the slow neutron caption process of nucleosynthesis, and ⁷Li(d,α) α, which might
be the key to explain the lithium production problem of the standard big bang nucleosynthesis.
Our results anticipate experiments on nuclear reactions in plasmas being
rendered possible at high power laser facilities such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure
under construction today, and shedding light on the validity of plasma screening models.