Direct measurements of the 12C(12C,p)23Na and 12C(12C,α)20Ne reactions at low energies for Nuclear Astrophysics

12C+12C reactions are crucial in the evolution of massive stars and explosive scenarios. The measurement of these reactions at astrophysical energies is very challenging due to their extremely small cross sections, and the presence of beam induced background originated by the natural 1,2H contaminants in the C targets. In addition, the many discrepancies between different data sets and the complicated resonant structure of the cross sections make the extrapolation to low energies very uncertain. Recently, we performed a direct measurement of the 12C+12C reactions at the CIRCE Laboratory in Italy. Results from a study on target contamination were used, allowing us to measure cross sections at Ec.m.=2.51-4.36 MeV with 10-25 keV energy steps. Two stage ∆E-Erest detectors were used for unambiguous particle identification. Branching ratios of individual particle groups were found to vary significantly with energy and angular distributions were also found to be anisotropic, which could be a potential explanation for the discrepancies observed among different data sets. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).