In reply to Eric Walker's message of Sun, 6 Dec 2015 08:11:00 -0600: Hi, [snip] >Do you have a sense of a lower bound? My impression so far has been that it >would be hard to fuse a 4He with anything lighter than beryllium, say, even if >energetically it is possible.
The production of Carbon in stars is based upon Helium fusion. Note however that A=5 is a very bad number for nuclear isotopes. They tend to be very unstable with extremely short half lives. >Perhaps the 4He would simply break apart the light nucleus upon impact, for >example. But this is just speculation on my part. That probably depends on how much kinetic energy the He4 has, and how much is needed to break apart the target nucleus. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
