The Origin of the Elements

There are about 35 nuclei found in nature, which are not susceptible to neutron capture and are explained by the p-process. The modeling for this process requires thousands of nuclear reactions involving both stable and unstable nuclei including (α,α), (α,p) and (α,γ) reactions. In a recent experiment, the cross section of the reaction 120Te(α,p)123I was measured in the energy range of astrophysical interest for the p-process. The α beam from the Notre Dame FN Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator bombarded highly enriched self-supporting 120Te targets and the γ-rays from the activated 123I was counted with a pair of Ge clover detectors in close geometry.