Seminar: Light ion nuclear reactions studied underground, and the upcoming LUNANOVA project

For two astrophysical scenarios, there are now observations with percent-level precision. Namely, the abundance of deuterium from Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the fluxes of several species of solar neutrinos from the proton-proton chains are now known with less than 2% total uncertainty. The interpretation of these data requires a physical model of equal precision. Currently, these models are limited by imperfect nuclear cross section data. In order to improve this situation, extremely low cross sections must be measured. This calls for experiments in underground laboratories, shielded from cosmic ray induced background. The talk will report on experiments from the LUNA and Bellotti labs in Gran Sasso and the Felsenkeller lab in Dresden, Germany. It will also give an outlook on future work at the upcoming LUNANOVA experiment in Gran Sasso.