Extraction of Astrophysical Cross Sectionsin the Trojan-Horse Method

Abstract.

 The Trojan-horse method has been proposed to extract S-matrix elements of a two-body reaction at astrophysical energies from a related reaction with three particles in the final state. This should be useful in cases where the direct measurement of the two-body reaction at the necessary low energies is experimentally difficult. The formalism of the Trojan-horse method for nuclear reactions is developed in detail from basic scattering theory including spin degrees of freedom of the nuclei and we specify the necessary approximations. The energy dependence of the three-body reaction is determined by characteristic functions that represent the theoretical ingredients for the method. In a plane-wave Born approximation of the T-matrix the differential cross section assumes a simple structure.