Low energy beam induced background studies for a 12C(12C,p)23Na reaction cross section measurement

The cross section of 12C+12C fusion reactions determines the conditions of carbon ignition in stars. The presence of structures, which are likely to extend to low energies, makes the extrapolation of data collected at high energy to the stellar energy difficult and potentially inaccurate, so a direct measurement is desirable. Here we report on an extremely improbable two-step background process which prohibits the measurement of the 12C(12C,p)23Na carbon fusion reaction at low energies in the presence of deuterium contamination. It appears that with a modified setup and selected targets reliable measurements down to Ecm=2.0 MeV are possible