Nuclear Reaction Rates in Dense Plasmas

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We solve the quasiclassical problem of tunneling through an external potential barrier in a dense plasma, where the tunneling particles undergo simultaneous collisions with other particles in thermodynamic equilibrium. Under such conditions the spectral density of states available to the particle has a Lorentz shape, rather than the delta function, which leads to a quantum tail in the particle momentum distribution function. We show that, this tail indeed significantly alters the average nuclear reaction rates, which supports earlier suggestions. This rate can be many orders of magnitude higher than would be normally calculated by averaging over the Maxwell distribution of energies.