Dynamic Screening in Thermonuclear Reactions

It has recently been argued that there are no dynamic screening corrections to Salpeter’s enhancement factor in thermonuclear reactions, in the weak-screening limit. The arguments used were: 1) The Gibbs probability distribution is factorable into two parts, one of which, exp(−β∑ eiej/rij) (β = 1/kBT ), is independent of velocity space; and 2) The enhancement factor is w = 1 + βeZ1Z2〈φ〉 with 〈φ〉k = 〈E〉k/k and 〈E〉k/(8π) = (T/2)[1 − ε−1(0, k)]. We show that both of these arguments are incorrect. Subject headings: nuclear reactions, nucleosynthesis, abundances