New Experimental Studies on Carbon Burning at LUNA

The 12C+12C fusion reaction occurs in high mass stars as well as during explosive nucleosythesis such as the ignition of a supernova type Ia on the surface of a white dwarf. This reaction is thus quite important astrophysically, however it remains not well understood at the occurring energies due to a very low cross section. To reduce uncertainty, the LUNA experiment under the Gran Sasso massif took data down to 2.1 MeV in the center of mass frame. The mountain combined with passive shielding of the detector setup allows a significant reduction in the amount of background radiation for gamma detection. From this campaign, data was taken from radioactive sources and the 14N(p,γ) reaction for the purpose of efficiency calibration. This data we used to fit an efficiency function to normalize the 12C+12C detection counts. With this, we then calculate the preliminary infinite yields for each run and compare with the previous results of Spillane et al. and Tumino et al. S*-Factors. We find that the data more closely follows that of Tumino et al., with a higher trend to the infinite yields, with significant uncertainty still.