Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
Welcome on the LUNA pages at LNGS
The Hans A. Bethe Prize 2010
of the American Physical Society has been assigned to Claus Rolfs "for seminal contributions to the experimental
determination of nuclear cross-sections in stars, including the first direct measurement of the key 3He fusion reaction
at solar conditions." Claus Rolfs is co-founder and member of the LUNA-Collaboration.
To celebrate this prize LNGS organizes CLARO 2010 on April 2010.
What is LUNA about
It is in the nature of astrophysics that many of the processes and objects one tries to understand are physically inaccessible. Thus, it is important that those aspects that can be studied in the laboratory be rather well understood. One such aspect are the nuclear fusion reactions, which are at the heart of nuclear astrophysics: they influence sensitively the nucleosynthesis of the elements in the earliest stages of the universe and in all the objects formed thereafter, and control the associated energy generation, neutrino luminosity, and evolution of stars. LUNA (Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics) is a new experimental approach for the study of nuclear fusion reactions based on an underground accelerator laboratory.
A review on the LUNA activies has been published in August 2009 in Reports on Progress in Physics.