Solar Fusion by Quantum Tunneling
This is supposed to be a short OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) lecture to accompany the Teaching Company Lecture 48 by Prof. Alex Filippenko. His lecture is entitled “How Stars Shine — Nature’s Nuclear Reactors.
In the lecture I tried to indicate how important quantum tunneling under the repulsive coulomb barrier between two protons is.
I also tried to emphasize the importance of a light neutrino is in allowing one of the protons to convert to a neutron, which is fused into the deuteron.
The fusion of another proton into He3, and then the fusion of two He3 to one He4 and two free protons completes the fusion to He4 of four protons to release 25 MeV of bound energy.
Here is the lecture: Solar Fusion