https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-025-01752-w
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Gas-cell development for nuclear astrophysics motivated studies on noble gas targets and the 3He(
,
)7Be reaction
1
HUN-REN Institute for Nuclear Research (HUN-REN Atomki), Bem tér 18/c, 4026, Debrecen, Hungary
2
Doctoral School of Physics, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Debrecen, Egyetem tér 1., 4032, Debrecen, Hungary
3
Institute of Physics, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Debrecen, Egyetem tér 1., 4032, Debrecen, Hungary
4
Instituto de Física Corpuscular (CSIC), Valencia, Spain
5
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare - Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (INFN-LNS), Catania, Italy
Received:
7
May
2025
Accepted:
20
November
2025
Published online:
1
December
2025
In many astrophysical scenarios, alpha induced reactions on noble gas nuclei play a crucial role. Studying these reactions in the laboratory requires the noble gas atoms to be confined in a sufficient amount to allow the reactions. At Atomki thin-windowed gas-cell targets were developed and improved for studying alpha induced reactions on noble gases. Several stages of the gas-cell design used for activation experiments and lately a version to be used for particle scattering experiments will be presented. A new experimental study of the 3He(,)7Be reaction with one of the activation gas-cell targets was performed. This reaction plays an important role both in the solar pp-chains and in big bang nucleosynthesis. The reaction cross section was measured in the past in several works, however, there are still energy regions lacking experimental data, rendering the extrapolations towards the astrophysically relevant energies uncertain. New experimental total cross section of the 3He(,)7Be reaction was thus determined here in the energy range of 
keV in about 50 keV energy steps. These results confirm the overall trend, and also the absolute scale set by the only one previous measurement in this energy range. In addition, two pilot experiments with the scattering cell were performed aiming to study the 4He(,)4He and 124Xe(,)124Xe reactions at 
MeV. These studies benchmark the performance of the cell and detection system both for light and heavy noble gas targets.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
