Neutrinos and Nuclear Astrophysics at LUNA

AbstractNuclear astrophysics plays an important role in understanding open issues of neutrino physics. As an example, the two key reactions of the solar p-p chain 3He(3He, 2p)4He and 3He(4He, γ)7Be have been studied at low energy with LUNA, providing an accurate experimental footing for the Standard Solar Model and consequently to study the neutrino mixing parameters. The LUNA collaboration is now studying the D(p, γ)3He reaction at Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) energies. The poor knowledge of this reaction is the main source of the uncertainty of the primordial abundance of deuterium in BBN calculations. In turn, the abundance of deuterium depends on the number of relativistic species existing in the early Universe, making the comparison between observed an calculated abundance of deuterium a powerful tool to constrain the existence of light sterile neutrinos or any other type of “dark radiation”