Screening Enhancement of Thermonuclear Reactions in High Density Stars

The screening function for zero separation for two reacting nuclei in a strongly coupled OCP plasma is obtained using new very accurate Monte Carlo OCP fluid simulation data by two methods. The first method obtains H(0), the screening function at x = 0, from the difference of free energies before and after the reaction. The second method is direct fitting of the Widom expansion in powers of x to the MC data for the pair distribution function, g(x). The two methods agree to 0.2%.