Nuclear AstroPhysics at ELI-NP: Preliminary Experiments with ELISSA Detector

Abstract

The Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) facility, under construction in Magurele near Bucharest in Romania, will provide high-intensity and high-resolution gamma ray beams that can be used to address hotly debated problems in nuclear astrophysics. For this purpose, a silicon strip detector array (named ELISSA) will be realized in a common effort by ELI-NP and Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (INFN-LNS), in order to measure excitation functions and angular distributions over a wide energy and angular range. An experimental campaign is ongoing in order to test the feasibility of the future study at ELI-NP. With this aim, an experiment has been approved at INFN-LNS in order to measure the $^{19}$F(p,$\alpha _{\pi }$)$^{16}$O reaction at astrophysical energies using a prototype of the ELISSA array. Moreover, an exploratory experiment to measure the $^{7}$Li($\gamma$,$^{3}$H)$^{4}$He reaction has been performed at High Intensity Gamma Source (HI$\gamma$S). The good preliminary results of our tests and simulations allows us to conclude that the ELISSA detector will be very suitable for nuclear astrophysics experiments with the upcoming gamma ray beam at the ELI-NP facility.