DWBA analysis of the 13C(6Li, d)17O reaction at 10 MeV/nucleon and its astrophysical implications Original Research Article

The value of the α spectroscopic factor (Sα) of the 6.356 MeV 1/2+ state of 17O is believed to have significant astrophysical implications due to the importance of the 13C(α,n)16O reaction as a possible source of neutron production for the s process. To further study this effect, an accurate measurement of the 13C(6Li, d)17O reaction at Elab=60 MeV has been performed recently by Kubono et al., who found a new value for the spectroscopic factor of the 6.356 MeV 1/2+ state of 17O based on a distorted wave Born approximation (DWBA) analysis of these data. This new value, Sα≈0.011, is surprisingly much smaller than those used previously in astrophysical calculations (Sα≈0.3–0.7) and thus poses a serious question as to the role of the 13C(α,n)16O reaction as a source of neutron production. In this work we perform a detailed analysis of the same 13C(6Li, d)17O data within the DWBA as well as the coupled reaction channel (CRC) formalism. Our analysis yields an Sα value of over an order of magnitude larger than that of Kubono et al., for the 6.356 MeV 1/2+ state of 17O.